


the Sprawl

by deniigiq



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Family Drama, Family Dynamics, Gen, I love him, M/M, Matt spreads when he sulks, couldn't leave it so added a deaging bit, i will write the dead man if i please, jack is not dead, leave me I just want to see them be HAPPY, leave me alone, this is a brief interlude back into lying by omission, welp
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-12-12
Packaged: 2020-01-24 04:31:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18563965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: Foggy asked him why he’d had to die on a semi-regular basis in a tone that suggested to Jack that Matty had been tormenting him with his nonsense for far longer than he’d anticipated putting up with it.(Follows Matt and Jack in the year they have together after Lying by Omission.)





	1. the sprawl

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Lying by Omission](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15550440) by [deniigiq](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq). 



> So this is a teeny brief scene from Matt and Jack's year together from my fic 'Lying By Omission.' You don't have to read that to enjoy this though, you just need to know Jack came back from the dead for a little bit.
> 
> Oh, note: Jack refers to Sister Maggie as 'Grace' in this fic. It's her middle name and he's always thought it suited her better. Only he calls her that and she lets only him do it because she loves him and can't cope with emotions like SOMEONE we know.

Jack might have been a little dead for a few years here, now, and so his grip on reality was maybe not so good. But there were a couple of things which were trapped in his head, forever etched onto the inner shell of his skull, which even decomposition couldn’t eliminate.

The first was, of course, that he was madly in love with—to a fault if he was truthful with himself and God—Grace and always would be.

Even if she had kind of left him and Matty out in the cold in the early days there. And yeah, even though she sometimes had the emotional range of a wet mop.

He thought it was kind of cute. Like how people thought them huge fluffy, Aristo-Cats-looking cats were kind of cute.

The second thing not even hellfire could make him forget was that he was still not talking to his fucking family and until they got their shit together and apologized first—something which would happen only when a bottle of liquor or a pack of smokes needed to be bummed and something which would only happen seriously when the earth was eventually swallowed into the sun—he was damn sure retaining that status quo. Dead or undead.

The third and most important thing that he kept at the back of his brain at all times was the fact that Matty was the light of his life. Truly the best thing that had ever happened to him, absolutely the most important and precious thing he’d ever had the chance—the _opportunity_ —to touch and hold, even though he was possibly the biggest drama queen in the history of the United States itself.

He told himself this, surveying Matt’s lifeless, sprawled limbs on the living room floor, and tried to work out from a distance whether this was a Suffering Sprawl or a Too Exhausted by the World to Breathe Sprawl.

Usually if you waited a few seconds, it would become more or less clear.

This time, though, he seemed well and truly in deep.

His palms were up, though, so that had to be a sign of something.

Foggy told Jack reliably that he’d stopped trying to identify Matt’s nonsense in the vain hope that ignoring him would teach him how to express emotions in words. Jack thought that was very optimistic of him. He’d tried that in the early years there, when Matty had taken up this habit, sometime around three probably, and had found that all that did was encourage him to mope and drape for hours, days, and on one memorable instance, weeks, at a time.

But then, at that point Matty had been only marginally smarter than a particularly well-trained dog.

Now, he was brilliant and fast-talking and smooth-talking and handsome and polite. Everything Jack had ever wanted him to grow up to be.

But in the category of ‘feelings,’ it was pretty clear that this wasn’t so much a case of willful refusal to change behavior so much as it was a fucking dazzling display of Grace’s indomitable genes. Jack should have known. He should have recognized it from the start.

What was incredible about this whole situation was that Grace tolerated exactly none of it, and when Matt even toed the line of drama around her, as Jack had witnessed a few times in the last month or so, she gnashed her teeth and herded him back a safe distance from her territory.

Matt would then squint and sneer and grumble in begrudging defeat and would go find somewhere else to have his feelings, away from the judgment of his mama’s gaze.

Jack was pretty sure that in his final phone call, he’d conveyed to Grace that the teeth-gnashing was no longer appropriate in their circumstances. But alas, after he’d heard what had gone down in his absence, specifically around Grace and Matty finally connecting as mama and baby after nearly twenty years of strained silence and, for Matty, horrendously confusing herding, he couldn’t say he was too surprised.

Foggy asked him why he’d had to die on a semi-regular basis in a tone that suggested to Jack that Matty had been tormenting him with his nonsense for far longer than he’d anticipated putting up with it.

Yeah, he got that.

Kid was stunningly easy to fall for and then you woke up to this kind of shit and wondered why you hadn’t just left him in the Salvation Army that one time when he was two.

“Gimme a hint, baby boy,” he finally said, putting the bags of groceries on the counter.

Matt didn’t deign to move.

Jack gave him five seconds before shrugging and starting to put the stuff away according to Matt’s precise organizing system.

Precise was the joke.

Matt, for all his meticulousness, eschewed labels like it was his job. He’d very carefully had little metal tags with braille on them set under the shelves in his kitchen and had then proceeded to ignore everything they stood for. Jack couldn’t read braille like Matty could, but he knew how to spell ‘bread’ and that there, sitting in bread’s place was 100% not bread. It was a can of chickpeas. Sitting all on its lonesome there because Matt had forgotten to label it and needed to pick it up every few days and go find someone to ask what it was, before nodding, resolutely _not_ labelling it, and sticking it right back where it came from so that he could do the whole thing again that Friday.

Jack was so happy that he’d retained so much of his personality.

“Daaaaad.”

Ah. There we go.

“’Sup, champ?” he said.

“Can you stop, like, doing things?”

Hm. Probably. But no.

“Noisy?”

“Mm.”

“That’s tough.”

“Ugh, _why_.”

Because you refuse to buy food like a normal person, Matthew. If you did, then you wouldn’t have to listen to all the bag rustling and restocking all at once. You could drag it out through the week, like you did with your drama.

“Dad.”

“Yes, dear?” He could do this all day.

“ _Stop_.”

“Ah, I see.” Seriously. All day. “Why don’t you get up, there, kiddo?”

Matt covered his face with his hands and grumbled.

Jack paused in stuffing produce in the fridge drawers.

“Hey, weren’t you and Foggy going out tonight?” he asked.

Matt grumbled harder. Jack snorted.

“I see,” he said.

“I don’t.”

He was so cute, trying to be funny over there.

“Baby, get up. You’re making yourself feel worse.”

No. Over his dead body apparently. Alright, well. He asked for it.

“You know how much you remind me of your mama when you do that?”

The deep-seated fear of Grace bursting through the door and witnessing this behavior propelled Matt up faster than anything Jack had ever tried. He was kind of jealous. Grace hadn’t even been in the mom-role for two years of Matty’s life and she still got the mom guilt-trip reaction more than he did.

Unfair.

Still though, Matt was off the floor finally. He pouted his way over to the counter to sulk on that instead. Jack ruffled his hair after he washed his hands and reveled in the resulting noise of disgust. He leaned on the other side of the counter.

“Matty,” he said.

“Daddy.”

It still made his heart clench when Matt did that. That was playing dirty.

“Matty, have you considered perhaps apologizing to Fogs for being a grumpy idiot?”

Matt sunk lower into the countertop. Yeah, right on the money.

“No,” he mumbled.

“Kay, well. Are you considering it, now?” Jack needled. Matt flipped his face so that his other cheek rested on the counter and huffed.

It was a type of yes, so that counted.

Jack watched him for a minute and then stood back up to resume his pots banging and Matt groaned and covered his head with his arms.

“ _Fine_.”

Ah. Good choice. Jack would leave the kettle as it was then. He’d scrub the fuck out of it once Matt had gone for the evening.

 

 


	2. mlemon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so I have no other way of writing Jack atm and I am constantly desperate to write Jack, so I guess this is what we get? 
> 
> Anyways, Matt's de-aged here by some kind of unspecified force to about 3 yo. He's still blind and enhanced. The whole thing is temporary, doesn't last more than 2 weeks, but Jack and Foggy and co have to put up with it (and him) until then. 
> 
> It's all still in the Lying by Omission context, so you may want to read that before this or whatever.

“Mlemon,” Matt told Jack in the kitchen. He was very determined to be underfoot in there, despite all of Jack’s best efforts. For all that the guy could coral Foggy, Karen, and Frank into the living room, he remained bested by a three year-old.

Matty was hands down, the cutest three year-old ever, though, so Foggy didn’t exactly blame Jack for giving in as quickly as he did. It wasn’t going to last for long, so Foggy figured that they may as well make the most of it. Ever so slightly more entertaining than watching Matt was watching Frank watch Matt and try not to die. He wanted to hold Matt so bad. He was desperate to act on his dad instincts.

Desperate.

Jack tolerated him. Didn’t trust him. Tolerated him. Who he actually trusted was Maria, Frank’s wife and the final occupant of the living room. She had voiced her disappointment that Frank wasn’t the one toddler-i-fied earlier that evening and was still working through pouting about it.

Frank ignored this. He had dad instincts to fight.

“Mlemon!” Matty said again from, apparently, somewhere around Jack’s hip judging from the way he kept moving pans away from the edge of the stove.

Matty didn’t quite have a speech impediment, more like certain sounds were harder than others and needed some help getting up onto them. Jack had demonstrated this with the word ‘peach’ earlier. He gave Matt a peach and had him feel it and tell him what it was, to which Matt replied almost instantaneously, “Peesh!”

“Peach,” Jack corrected with just the slightest emphasis on the ‘ch.’

“Peesh!”

“Peach.”

“Peeeeee-sh!”

“Alright.”

Matt didn’t want to eat the peach, he wanted to fit it into Jack’s pocket and then go whack his head against every available surface in the apartment. Jack let him do this while rolling his eyes and begrudgingly following after. There was no real point in Matty-proofing the place since this wasn’t supposed to last more than a week or two, although Matt’s dedication to maiming himself kind of made Foggy want to do it anyways. Just to do be safe.

But anyways, first it was ‘peesh’ and now it was ‘mlemon,’ which Foggy couldn’t quite tell was supposed to be ‘lemon’ or ‘melon.’ Jack, bless his heart, seemed to know the difference right away. He reached over into the fruit bowl, snagged a lemon, and handed it down to his kid without even looking.

“Mlemon!” Matt informed him.

“Lemon,” Jack said back.

“Mmm…Mmm..”

“Lemon,” Jack repeated patiently.

“Mmmm….”

Foggy was going to die. Matt was trying so hard. Karen had laid herself out on half of the couch to shake silently with laughter.

“Mmm…MMMM.”

“Lemon, honey. Llll. Not Mmm.”

“MMMMM.”

Frank curled up in his wife’s lap, trying to contain himself. She petted his hair and shoulder fondly.

“Mmmmmmm—Peesh!”

Jack set down his wooden spoon to brace both hands on either side of the stove. He was insistent that he be allowed to cook dinner for them all as a thanks for looking after Matt the day before when he was at the hospital getting checked out. It was completely unnecessary, but Matt had learned insistence and persistence from the best, it turned out.

The unwritten rule of this gesture was, of course, that Jack would die for the second time if anyone went in there to help him. Even Maria, who he got on with extremely well. No, he was cooking for them and they were going to sit back, relax, and like it, goddamnit.

“No peaches, honey,” Jack said once he’d collected himself. He looked down and saw that a certain lemon was being shoved into his hip. “You don’t want it anymore?”

“Mlemon.”

“Okay, gimme. Baby, you gotta let go.”

“Mlemon!”

Matt could chatter at you and hold a fairly good conversation at this age, but there were apparently a lot of words he was just plain excited about. Context was unnecessary. It was fun enough to just say them.

“You want up? Is that what this is?” Jack asked his wayward child.

“No!”

No, of course not.

“Alright, fine.”

“No!”

“Yeah, I got that, pal.”

Matt hummed and Foggy watched as his pale munchkin hand slipped the lemon up onto the counter. It rolled away out of his reach and the moment he realized that he couldn’t feel the skin anymore, he was _devastated_.

“Daddy!!”

“Yes, monster?”

“Daddy!! Mlemon!!”

Jack snagged the lemon and handed it off. The cries were immediately sated. Foggy thought that this man deserved a goddamn medal for his service.

“Mmmmm,” Matt murmured from behind the counter. Jack glanced over to him and then his whole body jolted like he’d been shocked by electricity.

“No, _no_ eating.”

Ah.

“No, no. Gimme.”

Maria started shaking in time with Frank’s shaking. They evidently had both trauma and humor associated with this very scene. Foggy imagined one of their kids had been a serial lemon-muncher as well.

“Matthew,” Jack said warningly. Foggy couldn’t see the face Matty was making back at him behind the counter, but he could only presume that it was doleful and involved lip wobbling. Jack held his hand expectantly down.

“Thank you,” he said eventually. And put the lemon, adorned with a few little bite marks, back on the counter. Matt made a supremely unhappy sound. Jack rolled his eyes and shook his head and went back to the pan. In the meantime, Matt’s little mop of orange finally, finally made it just over the counter. He couldn’t see shit even if he’d wanted to, but he had his pale little eyebrows hunkered down.

Boy was on a mission. A citrus mission.

Foggy had to bite his knuckles to keep from busting a gut on the couch.

Matt wasn’t quite tall enough to maintain his vantage point on his toes and so threw his arms up to the counter to pull himself up. One of them knocked against the lemon and he startled and fell back down. Horrified now, at having moved his target further away.

Attempt two involved more scrabbling. The lemon was about three inches out of reach. His fingers just couldn’t quite make it.

Karen started sobbing a little into a pillow. Matt dropped back down behind the counter, defeated again. He must have been able to smell the damn thing. That had to be why he was so irate and determined. Foggy almost wanted to encourage him to simply come to the other side of the counter, but no. That was not how Matt Murdock worked, not as an adult and certainly not as a child.

He popped up for the third time and Jack finally noticed him and grabbed him before he could stretch out an arm this time. He hiked Matty onto his hip and went back about his business while Matt whined the whine that came right before a tantrum.

Foggy’s heart squeezed a bit. He wasn’t sure he could take a crying, baby Matty. He could barely handle a crying, big Matty.

Jack, though, seemed to instinctually know the exact remedy for this He bounced Matt a bit and rocked slightly and the whining died down as Matt laid a cheek into the crook of his neck. He clenched and unclenched his fingers in Jack’s shirt and settled in for a good long pout.

Crisis averted. Irritable child acquired.

“Mlemon,” Matt mumbled grumpily into Jack’s neck, as though it was itself a curse word.

“Lemon,” Jack corrected.

“ _Mlemon_.”

Jack snatched the lemon off the counter and gave it to Matt again without looking at him. Matt practically crowed in delight.

It was the little things, wasn’t it?

Matt immediately bit into it without a damn care in the world.

For a second there, Foggy was sure that he’d start crying all over again, but instead, he just squeezed his eyes shut and, to the living room’s dead horror, took _another bite_. Pith and all.

“Uh, Jack,” Maria said.

“Hmm?”

“Um.”

Jack addressed his kid and then just fucking sighed.

“That good?” he asked.

“Mmmm.”

Foggy honestly wondered if he’d ever seen Matt happier in his life.

“Okay, great. I’m happy for you,” Jack said.

“Mlemon.”

“Lemon.”

They could apparently go in circles like this all day long.

He stood up and offered his hands to Jack to remove Matt before he caused any more trouble. Matt sensed his arms and hunkered in closer to Jack’s chest, protecting what was left of his citrus. Jack extricated him and handed him off to Foggy easily. Matt made a noise like he’d been shot.

Jack shushed him and, betrayed, he dug his little hand into Foggy’s shirt with the saddest eyes ever.

All this drama. For a lemon.

Speaking of which. Foggy gently untangled the fruit from Matty’s grip and set it gingerly on the countertop, out of reach.

He really didn’t need the extra fiber or vitamin C. Really, Foggy was sure of it.

“No!”

Or he’d thought he was sure.

“Noooo!! Mlemon!”

As though it was the Rose to his Jack on the Titanic. Really now?

“Fog _gy_!!”

Baby Matt said his name with the stress on the wrong syllable and it was so damn adorable that Foggy couldn’t bear to correct him.

“We’re gonna eat dinner soon, Matty,” he negotiated. “You’re not gonna be hungry if you have the mlemon now.”

Silence. Immediately. Matt stared up at him with empty, saucer eyes, then settled right the fuck down in his arms. Pressed his chubby l’il cheek against Foggy’s collar bone. Evidently, he liked it when they used his word for things.

“Kay,” he mumbled.

 

 

Foggy took him back to the couch and set him in his lap and tried to engage Maria in conversation like a grown-ass man. Matt allowed this for exactly two minutes before getting bored and wriggling out of Foggy’s lap to fall to the floor and scramble back up. He crawled up onto the couch with Karen and she grabbed him and blew raspberries into his neck.

He liked that too. But not as much as he liked Dad.

He squirmed out of Karen’s grip and in moments, was right back standing on Jack’s feet in the kitchen.

“Kiddo, you’re gonna be the second death of me, c’mere,” Jack sighed, hauling him up onto his hip again. This time, Matt went quietly and settled in, more or less well-behaved. He dropped his head onto Jack’s shoulder and stuffed a thumb in his mouth. Then proceeded to listen to whatever was going on in Jack’s neck with his eyes closed.

Foggy needed a fucking picture. He was but a man. He dug out his phone and took a few and then took a video of Jack swaying slightly with Matt in his arms, unaware of the camera.

Precious. 100% rainy day material.

“Mlemon,” Matt murmured softly.

“Uh-huh,” Jack said.

“Mlemon.”

“Where’d you learn that, anyways?”

“Peesh.”

“Oh, okay.”

Foggy was gonna cry.

 

 

Matt was hesitant with Sister Maggie, even though he looked more like her in his tiny form than he ever had. Jack jokingly called the Sister ‘mommy’ and Matt _hated_ that. Sister Maggie hated it too, she gave Jack eyes like she’d find him and suffocate him in his sleep if he said it again.

She was strangely awkward with little Matt. Where with Matt in his normal state, she was happy to touch and bully and needle, with little Matt, she seemed much more inclined to clutch him to her chest and glare at anyone who tried to remove him.

It was seriously like looking at a smaller, angrier carbon copy of Matt holding one of Foggy’s baby nieces or nephews at Christmas.

Jack wasn’t surprised. He called this hereditary behavior. Jack had a lot of answers for all kinds of shit Foggy had wondered over the years, and he was blown away by the fact that, with at least one person in this crazy family, he could literally just ask a question and get an immediate answer. Sister Maggie talked in cryptic couplets and bible quotes. Matt spoke entirely in subtext.

Jack saw his kid whack his head against a corner and said simply ‘Wow, that musta hurt. Let’s not do that again.’ When asked why he refused to purchase one brand of something over the other, Jack looked you straight in the eye and said something perfectly reasonable like ‘same shit does the same job, that one’s just more expensive, ‘ or ‘I dunno man, I just always get the green one, never questioned it honestly.’

Which was to say that watching Matt and Sister Maggie interact under these circumstances was damn near painful. Matt refused to say more than two words to Sister Maggie and Sister Maggie was too preoccupied with protecting him from the universe to give him any real attention. They just. They just hadn’t been meant to be together at this point in Matt’s life. Foggy could absolutely see it now.

Maggie did, at one point, swipe a hand through Matt’s hair to smooth it down, but Foggy suspected this was more so that she could get as much of him as possible under her chin. Matt did not enjoy these enforced cuddles. He tolerated them for a few minutes before the whining started up.

“Dad _dy_ ,” he grumbled, side-eyeing Jack as best as he could without being able to tell exactly where he was.

“No can do, champ,” Jack said, leaning a hip against a pew. “She’s got her rights.”

“Dad _dy_.”

Matt was great at repeating words until they did something. Foggy was surprised at how little he could talk while still getting his way out of all of them over the last couple of days.

“Hush,” Sister Maggie said. And Matt made an unhappy noise into the hollow of her neck.

“Grace,” Jack finally said, taking pity on his kid, “You wanna ease up, there?”

“No.”

“Alright, good talk.”

These two did not deserve Jack Murdock. Karen pressed her own face into Foggy’s shoulder and shook with giggles.

“How about—” Jack started.

“Jonathan, I do not care; no.”

Wow. Marital bliss at its finest. Jack didn’t take the barbed jab to heart. He sighed.

“You’re scaring ‘im, sweetheart,” he said.

Foggy wasn’t sure Maggie was scaring Matt as much as she was just pissing him off, but sure. That seemed to get a reaction. Sister Maggie pulled Matt back to inspect his scrunched up face and, like a mama cat, she smoothed a hand over it a few times and then tucked him right back where she thought he belonged, despite Matt’s increasingly vocal protests.

“Daddy!”

Jack sighed.

“Alright, Grace, give him here,” he said. He sat down on the pew next to his tiny wife and held out his arms expectantly. Sister Maggie glared at him with nearly tangible mistrust. Jack shook his hands a bit with high eyebrows. She finally relented and released some of the tension in her arms to hand Matt back to his dad.

Matt wriggled out of her grip before the action could be completed and, instead of jumping into Jack’s arms, straight up bailed off of the pew and went to hide under on of the ones behind them. Jack let him go. Didn’t chase.

“Girl, you can’t be crushin’ him,” he said. “He don’t like that. He mighta liked it if he were smaller, but he’s too big for that right now. Here. Matty, c’mere, bud.”

Matt did not want to fucking go anywhere, but he had a hard time saying no to Jack. He glared over the top of the pew he’d selected and then ducked back down. When Jack stood up to retrieve him, he allowed himself to be picked up, but not without a whine and a half.

Jack sat him on the pew between himself and Sister Maggie.

“Okay, round two,” he said. “Let’s start with—AH.” He grabbed Matt by the arm before he made a break for it and resettled him down. “No,” he said firmly with a finger in Matt’s face. “That’s _rude_.” Matt looked like he wanted to bite it. He grabbed onto it instead. “Here, we’re gonna be friendly,” Jack said to his wife and child. “Let’s hold hands, yeah? Matty, let go. Grace, gimme.”

It was like watching someone forcibly drag two timid dogs towards each other. Jack connected the two hands he’d appropriated and then held them there before either party could snatch theirs away.

“Look how friendly we’re being,” he said. “Look how not hard this is.”

“Can’t see,” Matt helpfully supplied, just as Sister Maggie said, “How is this friendly?”

Foggy got the feeling that Jack was going to go visit Vanessa and drink heavily after this.

“Actually, let’s just pray, huh? Why don’t we pray? We like praying,” Jack tried a little desperately.

The other two were suspicious. They evidently did not see hand-holding as an important or desirable part of this praying business, but both relented. Matt even curled his little fingers around Sister Maggie’s first two in a gesture of goodwill. Probably for his dad more than anything else, but you know what? It still counted.

Sister Maggie led the little family in prayer. Foggy bowed his head respectfully and elbowed Karen to get her to do the same.

At the end of it, Foggy thought that the three on the pew seemed slightly more relaxed.

“See? Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Jack said with a smile.

Matt took the moment to have an emotion apparently too big for his little body and started wailing. He took his hand away from Maggie’s and held both out to Jack. That, evidently, made Sister Maggie feel like shit and she recoiled from both of them, which left poor Jack was worse off than when he started.

“Sometimes,” he gritted out, with Matt’s sobbing head tucked under his chin. “The Lord fucking _tries me_.”

Before they left the church, Matt managed to make himself hold onto Sister Maggie’s two fingers again for a brief moment. Again, it was almost certainly for his dad’s sake, but the gesture was sweet and so Foggy was sure to take a goddamn picture as unobtrusively as he could.

 

 

Baby Matt liked Frank far more than big Matt did, but Baby Matt was also frequently horrified to wake up from a nap to find that Frank was not his own father, but a pretender. This happened most often when Maria or Vanessa came by and kidnapped Jack for a break and a little peace and quiet.

Matt would be inconsolable for a few minutes pre-nap and Frank’s bulk apparently felt like Jack’s giant muscles and this was comforting to him, so he’d fall asleep in Frank’s arms easily enough before Frank put him down somewhere marginally safe for him to be.

Karen told Frank that he didn’t have to put Matt down, when he was out for the count, he was well gone. Wouldn’t wake up until he was damn ready. But Frank had strong feelings about his being allowed to touch delicate things. And he’d decided Matt was a delicate thing.

Matt was not a delicate thing. Matt had been tiny for one week and had merrily sliced up two fingers and one knee, given himself a minor concussion, and eaten two whole lemons when no one was looking. Tiny Matt was kind of hard core.

Frank didn’t see this, however. Frank saw a tiny person with breakable hands and feet, who made a whole lot of high-volume distressed noises any time something did not go his way. Frank decided that he was not allowed to touch this thing for too long for fear of triggering the distressed noises.

It was kind of sad. If Maria was with him, he was more inclined to act on his instincts to hold Matt for a little longer and cuddle him a little closer, almost as though he trusted Maria to tell him if he was fucking up more than he trusted himself. He didn’t seem to trust Karen with this task, and that was fair because Karen played with Matt like a Fun Aunt. She was more than happy to rough-house with him and tickle him until he was shrieking and Frank, Foggy now knew from Maria, operated under the ‘nurture ‘em _only_ ,’ principle with their own kids. He didn’t rough-house with his daughter or his son until they were something like six or seven years old. He was convinced he’d break them otherwise.

Matty, therefore, was in Frank’s opinion, too little for anything but gentle, gentle, fucking _careful_ handling. Watching Jack throw Matt over his shoulder and then watching Karen shove him across the rug gave the guy indigestion.

Foggy decided to fuck with him a little while he could.

Matt was grumpy immediately post-nap and he was irritable that his dad was not at home, but Foggy now knew exactly what cheered Tiny Matt up every time without fail. Jack had shown him. It was far too easy.

When Matt annoyed Jack, he just threw a blanket over his head and Matt lost his shit. He’d scramble out of the blanket and come back to shove it in Jack’s hand or pocket or waistband, whatever was closest and then he’d hurry back and wait for the chase. Jack would ignore him for a few seconds and then throw himself after the kid. When he cornered Matt, he’d re-execute the blanket and then leave him there to find his way out and start the cycle all over.

Foggy scooped Matty up off the couch and dumped him in Frank’s surprised arms, and then executed the blanket.

Matt was stoked out of his little mind immediately.

He threw off the blanket and chased after Foggy. Foggy grabbed him and dumped him in Frank’s lap again and threw the blanket on him.

Matt wriggled around in it, giggling, trying to find his way out. Frank had gone stiff with concern. When Matt escaped this time, he shoved the blanket into Frank’s hand because it was closer than Foggy’s. Frank blinked. Matt vibrated. Frank looked at the thing in his hand. Matt nudged at it in excitement. Frank looked at Foggy and then gingerly tossed the thing over Matt’s head. Matt was delighted. He got out of it quick and shoved the balled up blanket back at Frank’s chest. This time, when Frank moved to throw it, Matt leapt out of his lap and took off for his bedroom.

Frank did not follow. Frank was confused.

“He wants you to chase him,” Foggy said.

Frank blinked at him. Then slowly stood up and walked towards Matt’s bedroom. Matt rushed off inside to go hide somewhere.

Foggy heard the shrieks following Frank’s finding him and then smirked as Frank booked it back into the living room to resume his floor sitting by the coffee table. Matt came out seconds later on his heels, hip-checked the side of the couch, took a tumble and rolled right back up to his feet to dump the blanket into Frank’s lap again.

Frank twitched at the sight of the grazed elbow but Matty was already ready to run off again. He didn’t even seem to notice it. Frank analyzed this and waited. And waited. Then threw himself up and Matt took off and Foggy slid down onto the couch, smug and satisfied with himself.

 

 

Matt’s affliction wore off in week two and he grimaced at anyone who mentioned it, including Jack who had found a point of embarrassment to press all his fingers into. Matt snipped at him and did not appreciate Jack wandering into rooms to lovingly press citrus fruit into his hands.

He threw them back with undue force and Jack laughed every time, clutching at his belly.

Frank casually tossed an afghan over Matt’s unsuspecting head as a joke and got a bruise the shape of a fist for it.

Matt got scolded for that one, out of Jack’s respect for Maria’s property more than anything else, and the resulting blanket throw-down and wrestle between father and son was absolutely worth filming. Matt had the benefit of expert MMA training, but Jack had the benefit of a professional boxing career, about forty pounds, _and_ intimate knowledge of all Matt’s tickle spots.

It was kind of unfair. But it was extremely entertaining to watch Matt try.

“I could kill you,” he wheezed with his own dad’s thick neck trapped in his elbow. Jack leaned into Matt’s face and he recoiled to escape the onslaught but couldn’t go anywhere with his head on the floor like that. He made only sounds of disgust through the following overblown kissing noises.

“GET OFF GET OFF.”

“You give?” Jack asked and Foggy was suddenly slapped with several instances of Matt pinning he, himself down and then whipping out that very same tone. Aw. He’d learned it from the old man.

“NEVER.”

Hadn’t learned to pick his battles from him, though.

Jack went right back to the kissy noises. Matt threatened to punch him in the head.

Matt wouldn’t actually punch him in the head. He loved him too much. Also, his elbow was pinned. Jack threw him on his side and then curled an arm under his shoulder and that legitimately made him scream. And then, before Foggy realized what was happening, he got to watch Battlin’ Jack Murdock carry his grown-ass son—the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, the Man in the Mask, _Daredevil_ , _himself_ \--kicking and screaming, to bed.

He dumped him there and legged it out to the kitchen with Matt right on his tail. It was the blanket game on a whole new level.

Frank watched Matt tackle his old man in stiff horror.

“This is just disrespect,” he murmured to Maria. Karen had her phone out to film the whole thing over the side of the couch.

“He’s half your size, Jackie, you can do better than that,” Maria called.

Karen decided for that, she’d cheer Matt on. As far as Foggy could see, there would be no losers here. Couldn’t be, not when the stake were, for once, low enough to laugh at.

It was adorable. He was making Matt a google photos album with audio descriptions of this whole two-week adventure so he’d never be able to truly escape it.

 

 


	3. met her on a

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The baby-talk was outrageous.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tuesday is Matt's guide dog in the wily recesses of my work, in case you did not know. She is a golden retriever and is too kind to deserve Matt. 
> 
> She was written after Lying by Omission, however, and so did not make it into that story but now is her time to shine.

“Her name is Tuesday,” Matt said, cradling the dog’s head and staring up at Jack in challenge.

Challenge for what? No idea. Only god knew the workings of his son’s head.

“Tuesday,” Jack repeated.

“Yes. Tues for short.”

Yeah, he’d figured. That wasn’t the problem.

“Matty, you’re terrified of dogs.”

“Am not.”

Mm. Right. So they were remembering Matt’s childhood much, much differently then.

“Honey, the first time I took you to get a guide dog, you cried for half an hour.”

Foggy and Karen took that well. If by ‘well,’ you meant ‘collapsed into crooning and accusations of false representation of the facts.’

“Did not.”

“Did to.”

“Did _not_.”

Jack was not crazy. He was not misremembering this. He was 100% certain that he had had to pick Matt up and carry him outside the guide dog school because he would not settle the fuck down after a singular nose had nuzzled into his hand unexpectedly. He knew this because he’d felt like the worst dad in the world after a of couple of older blind folks and their sighted friends had come up to make sure that he wasn’t abusing his kid.

‘He’s fine,’ he’d told the concerned instructor who’d come out to dispel misconceptions and apologize to Jack. But then the threat of being made to return to the Bad Place had made Matty start wailing and clinging all over again. And it was only through the promises of the older blind folks that Matt did not _need_ a dog to function as a blind person that he’d started to settle down.

Jack should have gotten all those peoples’ phone numbers back then, really he should have. But he’d been preoccupied at the time with feeling like the shittiest parent in the universe.

That made this whole thing a little jarring, as the Matt in front of him had graduated to clutching at the dog like an insult to her was an insult to his own person. So yes. Weird. And very discombobulating. But Jack decided that he was gonna throw this battle.

He was great at throwing battles.

He _could_ win them. He could point out that he knew Matt still wasn’t down with dogs because he’s watched, two days ago, as a chihuahua in a gal’s cart at the grocery store had shocked Matt out of one of his intense fruit holding sessions. Matt had edged away from the yapping with much alarm, and slowly, slowly made his way back to Jack to scowl towards it behind the safety of his shoulder. Jack could also remember that a similar occurrence had happened in the face of three extremely exuberant pugs who were taking up the walkway a week ago.

He could verbally remember both those ever so convenient things.

But he did not. Because he was presently here out of many different forms of mercy and was not terribly interested in picking a fight with his college-educated kid in front of his fellow educated friends. Instead he crouched down and held his hand out to Miss Tuesday who looked at him kind of sadly.

“Hiya friend,” he said.

Tuesday did not budge. She turned and bumped her head into Matt’s hand and, when he didn’t react, pressed it there, waiting for his attention.

“Come here,” Jack tried again.

Nada.

He hummed.

“Guess she—”

“Tues,” Matt said, standing now with the dog’s attention. “Go on.”

Tuesday looked at Jack. Then leaned against Matt’s knee.

“Tues? What’s the matter, girl? Go,” Matt encouraged her. “That’s Dad. We like Dad. Go make friends.”

The dog stared at Jack like he was any other brick wall on the street. Like she couldn’t tell what Matt was even telling her to look for.

“Matty, it’s fine,” he said. “She’s probably--”

“Tues!”

Oh, okay. New tact. Excitement.

“Go on, girl! Go on! Make friends! Go!”

Tuesday watched Matt’s flailing and slowly started to wag her tail.

“Matty.” This kid was embarrassing himself. It was highly unnecessary.

“Go on! You can do it! Look, look, look. Friend. Go make friends. You like friends.”

Tuesday and her wafting plume looked back at Jack, almost like she cared this time.

“Good girl,” Matt encouraged. “Such a good girl. Go, go, go.” He gave her a nudge with his knee and she lost all interest in Jack to stumble and then stare back up at Matt like he’d fucking kicked her. Matt could not see or read doggy expressions, but even he seemed to know the smell of betrayal.

“Tuesday, no. You’re okay. Go make friends,” he said. “Dad, call her.”

Well, alright. Jack patted at his thighs and that got her attention. Her tail wagged again.

“Come here, Tuesday,” Jack told her, “Come here, little one. You’re alright.”

The plume wagged faster.

“Yeah, see? I’m not scary,” he baby-talked her. “Come here.”

She shuffled her paws and took a couple of dancing steps forward and then back, looking back up at Matt. She whined, bless her.

“Go on,” Matt said. He leaned down and unclipped her harness. “Be free.”

Sweet freedom, indeed!

As soon as the harness was off, Tues did a cute little circle around Matt and then went and rubbed her face all over Foggy and Karen and then finally jogged over to smell at Jack’s hands. She wriggled her head under them and panted up at him. She was a beautiful dog. She had a purple collar under the harness and a big, drapey tongue.

Jack gave her back rubs and she decided that that was great and so sunk down under his hands until she was staring up with sad eyes at him from the floor, one paw helplessly hung in the air. Pleading for belly rubs.

Alright, sure. Belly rubs.

Tuesday didn’t really have a let-it-all-hang-out happy face, but she leaned her head back and licked at his knee while he scrubbed at her hairy belly, so he figured that she was at peace. As soon as he stopped, she wriggled up and jogged back over to Matt who had scurried around to hide from her behind the counter. She wagged her plume at his hidden figure.

“No! Shoo!”

More wagging. A head nuzzle. Possible nibbling.

“No, no! Shoo. Go play with Dad.” Matt’s hands appeared around the edge of the counter to shove her back. She waited until the hands were gone and then took two more steps forward and wagged her tail.

“Tuesday, no. Go make friends. I’m hiding.”

Hiding so well.

“Shoo!”

Tues whined.

“Out!”

She made a muffled little half-bark.

“Aigh.”

She took the sound as permission and stepped forward to climb into Matt’s lap. Left her hind legs and tail peeking out from behind the counter.

“You’re such a bad dog,” Matt told her over the sound of jangling tags. “The worst dog. The _worst_ dog.”

Tuesday wagged harder and her back legs started to dance. Nails clattering against the floor.

“Is Tuesday home for good then?” Jack asked, finally standing out of his crouch.

“If you don’t mind,” Foggy said from the couch. “She’s been at my place and I don’t mind her, but Matt’s—”

“The worst dog! You’re the worst dog!”

The baby-talk was outrageous. Jack was 100% sure that that was how he’d used to sound years and years ago with Matt back at the gym. The other guys used to give him no end of shit about his ‘Matty-voice.’ Even if they adopted the exact same tone when baby Matt had been handed over into their arms.

Load of hypocrites. He’d said it then and he’d say it now.

Fogwell had been the worst of them all. He used to play it cool while he picked his way through the benches over to where Jack used to carefully stow baby Matt when he was in the ring. The old man would stand next to Matty’s little carrier for a second and then he’d pretend that Matt was crying, so as to have an excuse to scoop him up out of it. And then he’d adopt his most hard-ass, big-boss coach voice as he stomped around, with Matt tucked up against his giant shoulder.

It had been a task and a half to get past the distraction that was Matt’s cooing and grabbing at Fogwell’s face in order to hear the old man’s demands and advice.

When Matty had finally started to work out how to talk, he’d broken Fogwell’s heart when he told him, “Too big for ups!”

“Too big?,” Fogwell had asked, shattered, “Are you sure?”

“Mm.”

“Sure-sure?”

“Mm! Only daddy ups.”

“Oh, okay.”

And Fogwell had left to go cry at the reception window. And Rudy and Raph and even fuckin’ _Bert_ had grabbed Jack and dragged him to a corner of the gym and told him in no uncertain terms to go reeducate his child for the sake of everyone’s fucking careers. It had taken some very strategic toddler reasoning to convince Matt that non-daddy ups were okay at the gym.

“Fogwell’s a daddy,” he’d said to Matt’s suspicious squint.

“Not daddy.”

“Right, maybe not _your_ daddy. But still a dad—”

“NOT DADDY.”

“Okay, okay. Not daddy, yeah I get that. But _a_ daddy. The old man’s—actually, how about we do it this way? Fogwell’s like a grandpa, yeah?”

“Grampa?”

“Uh-huh.”

Matt hadn’t known what the fuck a grandpa was back then since one of his was long-gone and the other was an inkblot on the face of mankind and it was for that, that Fogwell’s carrying rights were reinstated. It was the first time the family feud had ever proved useful. Probably the last time too if Jack thought about it.

He could ask Matt if it had since proved of any use to him, but Matt had made the mistake of laying on his side in the kitchen and was busy being sniffed at and stood on and checked for injury. Boy was giggling helplessly down there and Karen wasn’t helping by loudly telling Tuesday to ‘get him, get him!”

Meh.

That was enough for Jack. Tuesday was good. Tuesday could stay.

Jack would eventually befriend this dog.

 

 

 


	4. sleep child

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt had always been a nightmare to get to sleep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm feeling like I need some emotional pain friends!!!  
> Have a sip or two with me!

Matty was sleeping.

Thank fuck.

Thank Jesus.

And Mary and Joseph and all the saints all the way down the line.

His fingers twitched a little bit on the edge of the bed and his brow furrowed and smoothed out a few times every minute or so. And while it didn’t look like it was a nice sleep, it was still _a_ sleep and so Jack was going to count that as a win.

Matt had always been a nightmare to get to sleep. At first it had been a mix of separation anxiety and generally being hungry or wet or cold. The guys at the gym had told him that that would improve when Matt got older, and in some ways it had, until it hadn’t and people eventually ran out of advice for him. As a little one, from about three to eight, Matt had been insufferable around bedtime. Jack had literally dreaded bedtime because it was like his angel-child transformed into a demon. Matt would cry and cry and _cry_ when dinner had been eaten, homework had been done, and the daily scrub had been inflicted upon him.

Jack had tried reading bedtime stories. He’d tried soothing music. He’d tried tiring the kid out and telling him that he didn’t have to sleep, he just had to be in bed. But none of it had really had any significant effect.

In the end, he’d had to just let the boy cry himself to sleep.

It was the worst. Jack felt like the worst dad every fucking time.

And a lot of those times, he’d given in. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t bear to hear Matty suffering, especially because Matt’s hiccups triggered these memories of laying between the sheets, trying to stifle the tears and the sniffing in case Ma or Dad or Tom or Mary heard. He’d have no end of it if any of those folks had heard him ‘whining.’

Fuck them. No.

Jack’s baby wasn’t going to have to hide his fear or his pain from him. And, as much as Jack could help it, he wasn’t going to let him suffer it alone.

So his resolve crumbled and sometimes, he smashed it himself and went to lay next to Matty, stroking his hair and cheeks, promising him that everything was okay. Wrapping his boy up in his arms and singing and rocking him, even when he was probably a little too old for that kind of thing.

Matt never complained that he was too big for that stuff, even when he was eight or nine and better about nodding off on his own. Even when he’d waited up for Jack for four or five hours. He still held up his arms and wrapped them around Jack’s neck after pawing at his face and making sure that he was still in one piece. And even after those five, going on six, hours of waiting, he’d bury his fingers into Jack’s t-shirt and fall asleep on his shoulder to Jack’s low humming or rocking.

It had become second nature to rock Matt when he held him. There was nothing that soothed the boy faster.

Now, of course, Jack knew that a lot of that lack of sleeping had to do with Matt just being uncomfortable from his senses. He could understand that. It was hard for he, himself to sleep if it was just too hot or too cold. Surely, being hyperaware of every stitch and fold in the sheets, the blare of every tv in the building, and the echo of every footfall and siren in the street outside made that shit ten times worse.

Matty didn’t sleep much of the time, not because he didn’t want to, but because he couldn’t. He needed something to distract him from the hum, rattle, and screech of the world around him. He needed something to calm him down enough to block that shit out.

And while Matt hadn’t always had this affliction, and separation anxiety and a very valid fear of Jack not coming home one day had probably had more to do with his childhood insomnia, it seemed to Jack that he’d always been a hypersensitive kid. And so the rocking and singing had probably served that distracting, calming role back then.

Foggy did a lot of that work now. Matt slept on him all the time, much of it without even thinking.

It was adorable.

Matt, perpetually tired, would drop his head against Foggy’s shoulder in exasperation at some point and if you left him there for more than a couple seconds, there became a real danger that he’d just drop off entirely.

If Foggy was settled in on the couch, texting or reading briefs, Matt would worm his way in, through one of the thousands of stock excuses he’d made for himself, to cuddle against the guy’s chest and listen to his heart.

And then, again, in moments, they would be Matt-less.

When Foggy wasn’t there, Jack honestly didn’t know how Matt got himself to sleep besides pushing his body to the point of exhaustion. Turned out that even Daredevil was only human.

 

 

Jack slept on the couch. It was a fold-out bed type of thing and it was one of the fanciest ones he’d ever seen or used. Matt tried, every damn day, to get him to use his own bed, but Jack wasn’t having that. This was Matt’s apartment. Matt’s home. He’d picked his bed and he’d worked hard for it and Jack would rather die again than take that from him, no matter how much fucking _whining_ that resulted in.

The sofa bed was great. Jack liked making it and unmaking it. It gave him something to do as a nightly and early-morning ritual when his blind son was out getting the tar beat out of him and refusing to let anyone do anything about that.

Matt usually took a short nap before he went out on the town. Sometimes he took it at home, but more often he took it wherever the hell Foggy was.

He’d sleep for an hour or so and then get up to yank on his helmet and then away he’d go.

Occasionally, when Foggy was lacking, Matt would attempt to nap with Jack.

Jack hadn’t recognized this for what it was at first and had been concerned that Matt was depressed, going to sleep so early in the evening. His solution had been to wake the kid up for a few more hours until a more appropriate bedtime.

Naturally, this earned him hissing and grumbling and rapid abandonment.

Foggy had been the one to ask him why he didn’t let Matt sleep before going out to be Daredevil, and it was only then that Jack’s thick skull had finally processed that that had been what was going on.

Foggy had laughed at him. At both of them really, for being mutual idiots incapable of communication. Afterwards, Jack had resolved to do better. But Matt was a man burned. He came home, sleepy, and squinted at Jack with nothing short of supreme suspicion when he suggested a nap.

“No naps,” Baby Matt used to say at every turn.

Big Matt said something similar, except more along the lines of “No naps with _you,_ you callous behemoth.”

It didn’t take much, though, because Jack could still wrangle Matt into his arms and the rocking still worked, even to this day. Matt’s unconscious fingers still found their way into the folds of Jack’s t-shirts and, even though Matt was big and it was awkward to lay with his full-grown son on top of his chest, Jack still found it sweet and endearing and he didn’t want to move him when he’d finally drifted off.

Matty was a rigid guy these days. Stiff in all the worst ways. Like his mama. But also like Jack had been at fourteen years old and constantly aware that the ratio between touch being painful versus touch being pleasant was a good 8:2.

No touch, Baby Jack had decided at thirteen. No one was ever allowed to touch after this.

No touch, Baby Matt had decided at twelve, hell, eleven. No one was ever, ever allowed to touch. Period.

And here Jack had been trying to break that cycle for his son.

Matty was rigid even with him these days, without meaning to be, even sometimes in sleep, and that just broke Jack’s heart.

He could hold Matt and rock him before he ran out that night to be the hero that no one had asked him to be, but the feel of Matt in his arms was never the same as it had been when Matty had been eight, nine, ten. The kid he’d held then would at least relax into deadweight.

Matt didn’t ever seem to relax these days. He faked it for other peoples’ comfort. He faked it in his sleep. Fingers buried in Jack’s t-shirt, but spine tense, all the way down his back. The slightest jostle would wake him immediately. And sure, he’d be bleary and pliable, but the arch of his spine belied this mask.

Matt put on the sleepy act sometimes because if he woke up the way Jack saw him wake up in the morning most days, people would probably be freaked out.

When he was working off instinct or didn’t think people were watching, Matt just woke up. There was nothing before, between, or after. A click of your fingers and that was it. He was getting out of bed and putting on clothes.

 Like he was a machine.

It was a little shocking. Especially since Jack’s baby Matt had been a morning-monster at best. The boy would not sleep when he needed to and then waking him became the next Herculean task. This Matt who had mechanized his wakefulness made Jack’s back teeth sour.

Jack stroked his hair and told him to go back to sleep when he’d just been napping, and sometimes Matt would lean into his palm, almost as though he was considering it, before rejecting the idea and flopping/falling over Jack to go get his suit.

Nothing could come between that boy and his suit.

Not begging, pleading, crying.

Nothing.

Grace said that this was what their son was now and that the sooner Jack accepted that, the less painful it would be for both of them. But it was hard.

Grace pretended that it wasn’t, but it hurt her, Jack could see this. She patched Matt up every so often when he’d let her and she told Jack that sinking a needle into his skin made her feel eighteen years old, staring down at this pale, red-headed baby, and thinking about how there was never a worse mother in the world than she.

But it was all that she’d had to offer Matt for so many years that the act had become one of self-flagellation, which in the end, made her feel useful and connected to Matt and, she liked to think these days, made Matt feel more comfortable with her touch.

Matt didn’t talk about it. Even when prompted.

He called his mama ‘Sister.’

He got quiet and nonverbal when Jack said he was going to see her.

He refused to be with both of them at the same time.

He got upset once and asked Jack why he only called Grace as he did when her name was very clearly ‘Sister Maggie.’

Jack didn’t know what to say to this boy.

In his empty eyes, both of them had abandoned him and come back only when it was convenient. It had to make him feel insecure. Uncertain of what he’d done to deserve the attention and affection. And uncertain when it would leave and what would come in its wake.

Matty kept his distance from both of them while sitting right in their presence and under their hands.

He slept against Jack’s heart with his fingers half-hidden by the folds of Jack’s t-shirt and he settled in, exhausted and yielding, under his mama’s needles and washcloths. But his smiles felt brittle and his grip remained loose, as though to allow for Jack to pull him off, to push him away at any moment.

The world had been unkind—no, cruel—to his little boy, and the fear and violence and stiffness that had once lined Jack’s spine had made a new home in his son’s.

And there was nothing he could do to stop it.

There was nothing anyone could do.

Watching Matt sleep on his own with his fingers twitching and his brow furrowing shattered Jack’s heart. He stepped into the room and pressed a kiss against Matt’s forehead and sure enough, that was all it took to wake him.

“Dad? What’s the matter?” he asked in a slightly hoarse voice.

Nothing you could understand, son.

Not without taking this guilt into your own heart, and Lord knows, you have enough of it.

 

 

 

 


	5. the great(?) outdoors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You ever been camping?” he asked.  
> “No,” Grace said. She took a bite of sandwich. He followed suit.  
> They sat in the silence for a minute, chewing.  
> “You think I should look it up?” Jack finally asked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am sick!  
> I am tired!  
> I watched Jenna Marbles camp in her backyard and was jealous!!
> 
> (in case y'all weren't aware, I've written about Matt going camping once in the DFV in **like batman though.** So if you're interested in more camping adventures, you can go check that out. But yeah, Matt needs a bit of extra support when he goes out into the woods, etc, but that doesn't mean he doesn't try to be reckless.

“I’ve never been camping,” Jack said.

In retrospect, it was not a benign statement. But in the moment, he’d thought that it was just another fact.

He hadn’t been camping. He hadn’t taken Matt camping. His dad—useless dipshit that he was—had sent Bill to camp and then sent Tom out to the neighbors’ to camp, but had tossed his hands up at kid three and written off the rest of them to city life and city life only.

The closest Jack had been to camping was sleeping outside when home was too daunting to go back to in the evening. He’d slept on a few friends’ floors and couches and fire escapes in his time. He’d slept on the odd roof or wall if it was comfortable enough and he was tired enough. Grace had found him knocked out under her window once while he waited for her to escape her mama’s shrieking pretty soon after she’d left the convent.

She stood over him and claimed he’d damn near given her a heart attack. She made him swear not to do that again.

He promised he wouldn’t.

But when they got their own apartment and had a baby on the way, he might have fallen asleep in the kitchen once or twice.

Or, you know. Two or three times a week.

It became something of a habit and it drove Grace right up the wall. She’d gestured insistently at the pillow fortress-nest that she’d amassed in the bedroom every time she woke him up and asked him why the fuck he thought she’d gone through all the trouble of building it.

The wrong answer was ‘for the baby?’

The right answer was ‘for our family.’

It was maybe a little poetic or something that, after nine months of sleeping at the kitchen table waiting for the baby to come home, Matty used to fall asleep at the table waiting for Jack to duck through the door after work all those years later.

Matt still slept at the table if people didn’t have an eye on him.

He, like his mother, had a nesting impulse, which meant that he was very meticulous about all the linens and pillows and shit he piled on his bed. But apparently, the nesting impulse had crashed into Jack’s sleep disorder somewhere along the line in Matty’s DNA and the result was Matt being highly selective, borderline territorial, about his sleeping quarters and devil-may-care about where the fuck he actually conked out.

When he’d been a little one, Jack had had a more or less easy time carrying him back to bed.

Age made Matty about six thousand times more stubborn.

He would not be moved.

Jack tried to gather him up from when he’d knocked out on the kitchen bar once and that sleep disorder switch flicked on like a fuckin’ generator.

Matt stretched arms out and dug fingers in and glued himself to that goddamn bar. He then had the audacity to snuffle into the tile like it was his plump silk pillow.

Jack did not understand.

But then again, he’d never understood a lot about Matt and meeting him as a grown-up with the capacity to explain some of the weirder behaviors had done little to clear most of them up.

“Don’t like them,” grown-up Matt hissed in the direction of oranges.

Which was crazy-talk because this was the same guy who’d take a fucking bite out of a whole, unpeeled lemon or lime without batting an eye.

“Too sweet?” Jack tried.

Matt wrinkled his nose.

“They taste like murder,” he murmured.

“The pith?” Jack offered.

“No,” Matt said.

And that was that. Discussion had, accomplished, and complete.

His kid remained one of them Rubik’s cubes. A twenty-sided one full of dark matter and secrets.

It made Jack a little teary sometimes just how much Matty was like his mama.

Matt, however, it seemed, had finally found something that he’d decided that he liked completely and totally, all the way through. And that was being unleashed upon nature. And, like with the oranges, Jack just didn’t get it.

“Baby, we’re city folk,” he told Matt after Foggy had announced that he would not stand for the travesty which was Jack’s lack of camping experience and had set forth to put plans in motion to rectify this.

Matt blinked and made his signature, ‘do I fucking care?’ face. It was answer enough, but Jack, because he had nothing better to do, put a little more pressure on the point.

“We don’t need to camp—I certainly don’t need to camp,” he said.

Matt jutted a lip out at him.

“But there’s trees,” he said.

Oh, right. Of course, how had Jack forgotten? There were tall things in the world which needed climbing, which were not available to Matt in Hell’s Kitchen.

“Alright, so we can go to Central Park,” he attempted to negotiate.

“Dad,” Matt said flatly. “We’re going camping. You’re going to like it. Chill.”

But like.

 _Why_ , though?

 

 

Jack realized about an hour later that he was maybe being a little petulant about this. Matt was excited. Tuesday was excited that Matt was excited. That was two out of three, surely that was enough to swallow down the grumpiness and just give in to the general air of excitement, right?

Right.

They were going camping. And Jack was going to like it.

So help him God.

 

 

“But why?” Grace asked the next day over lunch. There were several sets of eyes peeking at them from around the corner of the patio, but Jack was used to all the kids in the orphanage glaring at him at this point.

They didn’t trust him with their beloved Sister Maggie, no matter how many times he brought her lunch, and that was sweet. It was good to know there was a small army of under-18s looking out for Grace when he wasn’t there.

“Apparently it was on my bucket list,” he said with a shrug.

“Was it really?” Grace asked, incredulous.

He’d brought her a sandwich with a peach for lunch. Wheat bread, ham, mayo, mustard, and bread and butter pickles. He’d made one with tomato and lettuce once when they were dating and the silent judgment that wafted off her as she’d picked the offending veg off of it had stayed with him ever since. He watched her carefully move around pickles as he tried to figure out if camping really was a thing that he’d ever cared about doing.

“Bill got to go camping,” he said. “Always told me it was good for the soul.”

“Bill murdered his step-daughter,” Grace pointed out.

Fair.

“You ever been camping?” he asked.

“No,” Grace said. She took a bite of sandwich. He followed suit.

They sat in the silence for a minute, chewing.

“You think I should look it up?” Jack finally asked.

Grace shrugged.

“Got anything better to do?”

No, not really.

 

 

Camping looked…hard.

There were a lot of moving parts if Jack was reading all these websites right.

There was a tent involved, which he’d figured from the start, but there were a whole lot of videos online about how to set up a tent. In fact, there seemed to be infinite ways to set up a tent.

How did you know which one you needed? Was there like, a couple ways that you just had to know? Was this information people learned when they went off to camp for a week as kids?

If so, Jack was seriously fucked here. And Matt was fucked by proxy—unless Foggy had, in his constant, patient crusade to do the Lord’s work, taught Matt these skills in Jack’s absence.

Just the tent was confounding enough, but worse yet was the load of folks who had very kindly compiled list after list of all the shit that needed to be stuffed into bags and brought along with the tent in order for camping to happen as it was supposed to.

Jack had gotten knocked out in the ring once and when he woke up, Rudy had informed him that half the gym had camped out in the main room to make sure he wasn’t dead.

That camping trip had involved, at maximum, a gym bag and a pair of gloves for all parties.

These lists were overkill, if Jack had anything to say about it.

But then again, Jack was an idiot with a highschool diploma and even that, just barely. He did, however, know someone who was less of an idiot and who’s highschool diploma had come to them with barely any work at all.

 

 

“You’re going what now?” Vanessa asked with skepticism dripping from her tone.

“Camping,” Jack told her and her arched eyebrow.

“Dude,” she said. “That’s totally not your backstory.”

“I _know_ ,” Jack said, “But Matt’s so excited about it—what else am I supposed to do?”

Vanessa squinted over Jack’s shoulder while she thought about it and then her eyes popped open all the way.

“I got exactly what you need,” she said.

 

 

Jack had met Wade. He was aware of Wade. Vanessa talked of no one the way she talked about Wade. And, bless her, those rose-tinted glasses had to be an inch thick at the least.

Wade Wilson was kind of a dick. In a good way. In a chill way.

Wade did nothing that he didn’t want to do and everything that he did. His brain was a one-way sieve with a Vanessa-shaped indentation in it.

He was also apparently Canadian, a vet, and a professional camper.

“Dear god, _why_?” Wade groaned upon learning of Matt and Co.’s intentions for Jack.

“I guess I need to do it,” Jack shrugged.

“I mean, _probably_ ,” Wade said. He was feeding a black and white cat pieces of what appeared to be turkey right from the pack.

“Babe,” Vanessa said, “Just like, pretend it’s your first time and tell Jack the top five most important things.”

Wade had severe scarring on his face and hands. He had no eyebrows, but that didn’t stop him from making the whole range of human expression. He hopped through emptiness, annoyance, thoughtfulness, and, that most important of all expressions, ‘ehn. Whatever.’

“Don’t leave food out,” he said. “Google what poison ivy looks like—if you touch it, do _not_ touch your face. Stay on the trail. Bring hand sanitizer. And mosquito repellant. And a hat. And water. Foil. Matches. And a fuckin’ harness for your kid—he’s an animal.”

Uh.

Right.

“Just follow Karen’s lead, she’s a forest child,” Wade said.

Jack actually? Felt relief? From that.

“Thanks?” he said.

“Yeah, sure,” Wade said. “But also, I dunno. Just have fun or something? I really dunno, man. I’ve never camped for fun.”

That was a little sad.

“You want to join us?” he asked. “I’m sure Foggy won’t mind.” He looked at Ness. “Is camping fun for you?”

Vanessa frowned in thought and looked back at Wade.

“Is camping fun for us?” she asked.

“No clue, babes,” Wade said.

“Do you want to go camping?” she asked.

Wade shrugged his shoulders. Vanessa hummed and turned back to Jack.

“Let us think about it,” she said. “We’ll get back to you tonight.”

 

 

Matt was excited at the prospect of having Wade around to harass on this camping trip. He called him and agitated him for nearly an entire hour before the poor guy gave in and said ‘fine, we’ll fucking go already, Jesus fucking Christ.’

Foggy was pleased. Jack suspected sometimes that he allowed Matt to do his bidding.

That was probably fine.

Foggy’s bidding was certainly safer than most of the other shit Matt spent his time banging his head against. It was almost wholesome even.

This meant, however, that Jack and Vanessa, two people who had exactly half of a camping trip’s experience between them, were now in charge of coordinating shit and fetching stuff on lists that Foggy and Wade just seemed to have in their heads.

They both had to request written copies and both got baffled faces in response before lists were extracted from the respective brains with almost patronizing indulgence.

Jack had the added struggle of Matt trying to steal and open shit which did not need to be stolen or opened yet. The mosquito-repelling citrus candles, for example. Matt was way into those. And so they were hidden under a bag of marshmallows which Matt was disgusted with.

They all needed to bring knives for cooking, but the knives that Matt produced and insisted they take with them did not appear to be food-safe knives.

They were the wrong shapes entirely.

Some of them looked kind of medieval.

That turned into a conversation about where the fuck these things had come from.

And _that_ turned into another conversation about the true extent of all the weapons Matt was alarmingly well-trained in using.

He just didn’t like them as much as he liked his red clubs, he explained over the pile of sharps Jack had forced him to produce from the recesses of the apartment. He kept toying with their edges like a kid who was in trouble but still really wanted to play.

They hadn’t even gotten to the camping part of this adventure and Jack was anxious and exhausted.

 

 

Nelson, Murdock & Page closed the office early on Friday.

Matt came home and practically crawled into Jack’s lap, he was so impatient. Jack let him wriggle in under his arm. He wasn’t done researching yet. There were still two billion videos he needed to watch to have even a chance in hell at knowing what he was doing.

Matt, however, was heavy. And Tuesday, who had been released from her harness, wanted to be wherever he was, up to and including Jack’s lap.

The two of them were really shit for getting things done around here.

This was exactly why Jack had never gotten Matt a dog.

Once the tail had been removed from his face and his son had been deposited where he belonged (on the floor) Jack submitted to the ordeal of being ready to camp.

The crowd went wild.

 

 

Wade was displeased at the thought of camping, mostly, Vanessa told Jack, because his version of camping usually included being under fire at some point in the night. He also had a less than beneficial relationship with most wildlife.

“There’s a fuckin’ reason I left Canada,” Wade grumbled.

“War,” Matt said.

“Besides war,” Wade said, rolling his eyes.

“Emotional abuse,” Matt said.

“Redthew, do I seem like I’m in the mood to be playing braingames with you right now?”

“Raccoons.”

“Better.”

 

 

Wade was good at three things, Jack quickly came to understand.

1\. Adoring and cherishing Vanessa at every possible opportunity.

The man was in-fucking-credible at that.

2\. Camping.

Wade was very, very good at camping. He could set up a tent with no instructions. He could make a fire in five minutes.

The guy was virtually unstoppable, although he and Karen had a competition going for the better, most prepared wilderness explorer.

Karen was similarly unstoppable, but with bluer eyes and more hair. She taught Jack how to pick poison ivy out of the brush and to steer Matt away from it, since he showed not even a little interest or care in avoiding it himself.

The third and final thing Wade was really good at made Jack’s chest feel too small for his heart. It made his diaphragm twist and his stomach squeeze a little.

Because Wade was really, really good at being a big brother to Matt.

He had a fist in the back of Matt’s hoodie every ten minutes or so and yanked him off to go harass someone or something else in the opposite direction when he approached something un-Matt-friendly. He herded Matt when they went for a walk—or a hike, rather. That’s what camping-people apparently called walks—and riled up the dog so that she’d step on Matt’s heels when he got especially annoying or a little too bold.

Matt hissed and spit at Wade and generally considered him a cramp to his style and a real wet blanket in the fun department here, but he let Wade guide him through especially tricky terrain and he didn’t wave Wade off in frustration when the climbing roots and rocks started up the way he flapped at Foggy and Jack.

Matt didn’t want their help. He wanted to figure out how to do this his own way, even though he had limited resources to do that.

Wade was better at describing terrain than Foggy or Jack or Karen and he eventually circled back from the front of the group to tell Matt that they were going to play Wilderness Simon Says.

Wade had Matt track his movements and copy them, so that Matt could find the footholds in the dirt faster than it took him to find them with his stick.

Matt, naturally, was ace at Simon Says. And he was stoked to be able to more or less keep up with everyone else.

Jack had to swallow hard so as not to cry at the thought that Matt had found someone who was happy to be his friend and come up with ways to make him feel like he was included in the group as an equal.

Vanessa caught him in the act of this feelings business and punched him in the arm, so you know.

That helped.

Matt also got a little bold and slipped right off the edge of the stream they were poking around. Tuesday panicked and leapt into the water after him.

She ‘rescued’ him. From two-foot deep water, yeah, but you know what? It counted.

 

 

Matt was cold, wet, and still far, far too amped for Jack to deal with at the minute.

When he was little, the overspill of enthusiasm could be scraped off by letting Matt loose on a blanket in the living room or wrapping him up in the same blanket and letting him prove himself smarter than a dog. When he’d gotten too big for these things to scratch that itch, Jack had found books and Legos to be a pretty good substitute.

And when all that failed, nothing could really beat throwing the kid at a plot of grass and telling him to go nuts.

They’d practically lived at the park before Matt had gone blind, and even after, one of Matt’s safe and comforting places was the park and so they’d been working on relearning how to navigate that expanse of green right before Jack had opted to go meet his maker.

He was aware that now, Matt’s way of coping with his energy was to either go beat the shit out of a bag or a person, or to go make bad decisions with one of his many long standing bad-decision-making friends.

These included, but were not limited to: Karen, a dark-haired, walking attitude problem called Jessica, a very lovely, but no less troublesome woman called Jennifer, a buddy called Danny, their pal called Luke, a woman who Matt called his evil twin whose name was, in actuality, Elektra, and Maria’s husband Frank.

Well.

Jack wasn’t so sure Matt and Frank were friends so much as nemeses. ‘Nemeses,’ Matt had explained, because ‘enemies’ suggested that there was a power differential here, in addition to unmitigated antipathy.

Once Matt had dumbed that shit down enough that Jack could understand what the fuck he was trying to say, it had boiled down to ‘Frank’s fucking stupid, but if he wasn’t a mass murdering fuckhead, we’d probably be friends and also he’s funny when he’s mad at me.’ With a healthy mix of ‘we actually have a lot in common and if someone ever tried to kill him without a damn good reason, I’d break them in half with my bare hands’ on the side.

Frank, according to Maria, did not reciprocate these feelings in so many words. Rather, Maria said, he called Matt ‘Red,’ and only Red, and apparently, Frank only gave nicknames to people he considered at least marginally likable.

Otherwise he called people by their full names or last names only like some kind of drill sergeant.

Frank refused to come camping because he was permanently camping.

Jack was fine with that.

Jack, for whatever reason, could not make himself like Frank.

Jack kind of wanted to fuck with Frank until he took a swing. Which was bad, bad, bad.

It had been literal decades since he’d felt that urge, that tension, that heat—the pull to goad.

In the last couple of years of his career, the goal had been to get back up. Go down and get back up. The thing that roiled around high in his chest hadn’t been doing a whole lot of wriggling or squirming back then, the way it had for the first eight or so years he’d been in the ring.

His mother-in-law—god rest her fucking soul— had called it a devil. A more technically honed version of the thing screamed out of Matt.

The thing that oozed out of Jack was slimier. Grittier. When he imagined it, it looked like a figure dripping with clotting blood.

It was interested in Frank—had been since Frank had admitted to twisting Matt’s elbow out of place.

It was like the damn thing had been given a shot of adrenaline.

So he was glad, quietly, that Frank and Maria hadn’t joined them.

 

 

By the time they got back to camp, Matt had fallen into enough streams and slipped down enough rocks and alarmed the dog so thoroughly that he was more or less back on the same playing field energy-wise as everyone else, although Vanessa had discovered, to Jack’s exhaustion and complete lack of surprise, that Matt would do anything if it started the with the phrase ‘I dare you.’

The two of them were now seeing how much shit their could hide in the sleeves of their jackets.

It was a good distraction while everyone else moseyed around, slowly getting things together for dinner. Tuesday followed Foggy around quietly and, when he settled down to scrub the little grill they’d brought along, came over to Jack to escape the sound of the steel wool scraping against metal.

He gave her pets and rubs and they had a good bonding session before Karen emerged from the blue tent, bleary-eyed and bushy tailed from a nap and declared that she was now fit for kindling gathering. Wade told her that she was not and she told him to go fuck himself.

Matt and Vanessa, bored of their arm-stuffing contest already, had graduated to Vanessa trying to get Matt to guess which cards she was holding up.

They both lit up at the prospect of doing anything which was not sitting.

Wade evaluated that and told Karen that he’d thought it through and would be taking her advice to go fuck himself so that she could lead the kindling expedition.

Wade was a smart man.

Karen surveyed her help and said, “Okay, we can do this,” in a tone which sounded a little like a pep-talk to herself.

Jack stayed back with Foggy, Wade, and the dog to watch those three go crunch through the underbrush.

“Vanessa’s got chaotic Matt-energy,” Foggy observed in Wade’s direction.

“You don’t gotta rub it in,” Wade sighed.

 

 

So.

It turned out that Matt and Wade had had a thing.

Yeah.

 _That_ kind of thing.

Jack wasn’t sure how he felt about that. A little weird for sure, but given that Ness had been just as dead as he had been and given that Wade was, generally speaking, very good with Matt, he decided that he would look past it.

“Man, don’t even trip,” Wade said, “It was super casual at best. Just fucking around until Nelson here decided to take the plunge.”

Foggy didn’t seem to mind.

Well, if Foggy didn’t mind, then it was okay.

 

 

The Kindling Team returned covered in pine needles and twigs.

Matt had a handful of viable kindling which he had very proudly dug right out of the dirt without anyone’s guidance or supervision.

Half of this handful had been disposed of since it was covered in ants.

This meant, of course, that Matt had been covered in ants and he had the welts to prove it.

Karen looked a little harried. Vanessa, however, was one giant toothy grin as she shoved into Wade’s arms a load of sticks of various sizes.

Hers, she said, had no ants—only termites. So take that, pretty boy.

Matt pointed out that his had a spider in them.

Foggy banished them both to fervent handwashing.

 

 

Jack wasn’t sure which part of this camping thing he was supposed to be enjoying.

The walk-hike had been alright, although he’d spent most of it having emotions and anxiety over his danger-prone child. The whole setting up part had been fine. The time to wait between kindling-excursions equally sufficient.

Really, the best part so far was sitting around, playing with the dog.

“I mean, that’s mostly it,” Wade told him, offering a beer his way. “You’re living it, man.”

He’d rather go to a bar with his buds.

“Fucking same,” Wade said with his own beer bottle raised. “Fucking same.”

Camping really wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Matty was having a good time, though. So that was something. He was listening for bugs at the minute, hunkered down in the hermit’s hovel he and Vanessa had built out of branches and twigs. They’d hunted down a scrap of cardboard and named the hovel ‘the Blanket Fort’ and they’d decided that’s where they were sleeping tonight to get the full camping experience. No one could do anything to stop them. No one tried, but the spirit of protest hung around the den anyways.

 

 

Foggy and Karen were chatting, saying that all good camp food needed to be slightly burnt. But there were just some things which Jack thought maybe didn’t need to happen at camp, so he gently shooed them away from the tiny grill and gave himself the job of preparing a less-charred version of whatever it was Karen and Foggy were imagining.

While he did that, Wade told him some of his more entertaining war stories.

Wade had a surprising number of entertaining war stories. Jack hadn’t realized that he’d been in the army for so long.

Nearly 6 years.

“Why’d you leave?” he asked.

“Dishonorably discharged,” Wade said. “Schiz got bad and I stabbed my CO.”

Well, shit.

“Must have been real bad,” Jack said.

Wade gave him a shark’s grin.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Real bad.”

He took a sip of beer.

 

 

That night, Jack decided he’d slept in alleys more comfortable than that damn campsite ground.

He nodded off and woke up abruptly around two in the morning to crunching outside the tent. Resolutely, he decided that his second death would not come about through idiocy, and so he waited it out.

It turned out that crunching was Matt hobbling around outside, laboring the night away with Jack’s hereditary sleep disorder looming over him.

Jack only knew it was him because Tuesday scuffled up from next to him to go investigate and Matt shushed her periodically as he meandered back and forth around the camp site.

Jack gave in around fifteen minutes after waking up and crawled out to join Matt in the dark. Matt seemed to know he was there even though it was damn near pitch black. He came up and touched Jack's shoulder in greeting and then took his hand to guide him away from the site in the dark.

It was eerie how Matt so easily moved between being both guide and guided. It was like he could smell the dark. He just seemed to know when it was his turn to hold people’s elbows.

He took Jack down to the stream just a few yards away. They both went slipping and damn near tumbling down the side of the trail, with Tuesday scrambling after through dead leaves.

The sound the rocks made seemed different at night. The water, too. It was like the grating and rush was amplified in Jack’s ears.

He heard Matt crouch down in the rocks and so followed suit. He heard a sound and saw, in the weak light, Matt dipping his hands into the water. He watched him. Then sunk his own fingers in past the jolt of coldness.

Even the water felt colder at night.

He glanced over and saw Matt watching him in his way. Head slightly cocked, the edge of his face lit softly by blue light.

“What’s it feel like to you, bud?” Jack asked him.

He got a flicker of a smile.

“Tues just thought a leaf was a fish,” he whispered.

Tuesday was a little further upstream. Jack couldn’t see her. But it made him chuckle anyways.

“She having a hard time?” he asked.

Matt’s smile was a little brighter when he showed his teeth. Jack held out a wet hand and pulled his head close enough that he could kiss his forehead.

“I’m glad you’re having fun,” he said.

“You hate it,” Matt snickered.

“It’s pretty boring,” Jack admitted.

“You coulda helped with the fort,” Matt pointed out.

Jack huffed and waved a hand.

“I got all the sticks I need in Central Park,” he said.

Matt leaned a cheek on one of his knees.

“Thanks for trying,” he said.

“Of course, kiddo.” Jack reached over with a little bit of faith and found Matt’s hair to ruffle it. “But we should probably rescue the dog. Sounds like she’s surrounded.”

 

 

Matt curled up opposite of Jack in the tent a once they returned from their late-night errand. Jack didn’t think he was sleeping, but then again, neither was he. He pulled fingers through Matt’s hair.

They didn’t say anything.

Sometimes, you don’t need to.

 

 

Karen was the first up and she made such a racket crawling into Jack and Matt’s tent that they were quickly up following her.

She’d come to take pictures. Obviously.

But her blackmail plans fell through when Matt caught her wrists and dragged her into their puppy pile. Vanessa sensed something was happening without her with her third eye and in no time, was out of her and Wade’s tent, adding her weight to that pinning Jack to the horrible hardass, rock-riddled ground.

Foggy came to break up the festivities and once Jack had escaped beautiful people hell, he and the dog went to take refuge at the picnic table.

When Wade finally deigned to rejoin the land of the living, he joined him and was immediately besieged by Vanessa who needed to be in his lap or else she would endure unspeakable suffering.

Wade’s tolerance for annoyance was untouchable.

He allowed himself to be sat on and then almost immediately abandoned in the good name of coffee (and, if Jack was reading this situation right, Vanessa’s sympathy for his tiredness).

 

 

They hiked around a lot during the second day, but things didn’t really change all that much.

There was no life-changing, perspective-altering moment for Jack.

There were just hella bugs and a lot of tromping around. There were many various forms of water to look at. Burs to pluck out of Tuesday’s fur. Matts to catch mid-trip. But beyond that, nothing too amazing, incredible or exciting.

By the end of it, Foggy looked him up and down and said, “It’s really not doing it for you, is it, man?”

No. Not really.

Jack felt a little bad about it.

“Don’t,” Foggy told him. “It’s cool that you tried anyways.”

Yeah, that’s what people kept saying.

 

 

“Was it fun?” Grace asked him two days later at their usual lunch spot. She’d made lunch this time. Chicken salad sandwiches with lettuce to combat the heat.

“It was something,” he said, having shown her all his raised and red mosquito bites. “Matty had fun. I think everything feels a lot bigger to him. You know, a whole lot of different smells and sounds and shit to break his knees on.”

Grace hummed.

“He fall into a creek?” she asked.

“Only like, four,” Jack said.

She grinned at her sandwich.

“If you’d have taken him when he was little, you’d have been carrying him around in a life vest,” she said.

True, that.

He tried to imagine taking Matt when he was a little one to the great outdoors. He probably would have loved it. Probably would have worn himself out scrambling around in fifteen minutes flat. Definitely would have slipped and rolled down a hill right into a stream. Definitely would have sat up and sprinted up the hill to do it again.

“I shoulda taken him when he was a baby,” Jack sighed.

“Hey,” Grace snapped. “No shouldas.”

Right.

No shouldas.

They didn’t do anything for anyone.

“Take him again,” Grace said.

Again?

“How?”

“You’re smart,” Grace pointed out. “You’ll think of something.”

Only Grace thought he was smart. She always had. He’d never deserved her.

“Hey,” he said, “I love you, you know that?”

She huffed a little laugh.

 

 

He didn’t let Matt go out to break his jaw or fingers in creative ways the next night.

This upset him.

He whined.

Jack told him to deal with it and come home after work.

He whined _harder_.

But he went and then Jack set about collecting all the linens in the house.

 

 

Matt was beside himself when his fingers scraped the roof of the fort that night. He almost didn’t even take off his suit before ducking down under it. Some prompting helped that and in no time, they were camping. Again. Kind of.

Camping in a way that matters, at least.

With a far less shitty ground to sleep on.

Matt laughed at him and made jokes about his delicate constitution. Jack let him make them and then counted all Matt’s bug bites out loud as obnoxiously as he could. Neither of them knew any stories which wouldn’t spark old traumas and so they found an app which read allegedly scary stories out loud.

They weren’t very scary. Matt had too many questions for them which he scathingly directed towards his phone for them to be scary.

Jack eventually turned it off and forced Matt to lay down while he told him stories that he never had before about their family. About Hell’s Kitchen.

Back before the bullet, Matty had been too young for these stories. Little bits of reality which he couldn’t understand or appreciate the same way he could now.

Now, Jack could smooth his hair and his cheek and tell him about his own grandfather, a grave man from the very south of Ireland who hated his daughter’s husband. He could tell him about the friends he’d had when Matty was little. The adventures he’d had on the odd nights he’d gone out with the guys after matches.

He could tell Matt about the series of failed and increasingly mortifying dates that he went on, that the guys from the gym kept setting him up on. The people who Grace tried not to laugh at when he inevitably came in to see her, boiling over with the need for someone to experience this madness with him.

Matt liked them.

Matt had his own stories. He was old enough to have his own and because Matty’s life was nothing that Jack had intended for it to be, they were all equally wild.

They then made smores over the kitchen stove.

Fed Tuesday bits of beef jerky.

And eventually decided that they’d done enough sleeping on the ground for the week, and so abandoned the blanket fort for their respective beds.

 

 

True to form, Matt didn’t stay in his.

Jack woke up to the dog breathing in his face and the screech of Matt’s alarm in the other room and soon there was a hassle as Matt snapped awake and realized he was an hour late for work.

Jack shooed him out the door with a half-tied tie and promises that he’d clean the house so just fucking _go already_.

And, collecting blankets off the floor, he thought that maybe he’d done right this time.

 

 

 

 


	6. get you a crustacean

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What’s the occasion?” Wade asked.  
> “Jack’s birthday,” Vanessa said over the guy’s attempt to downplay it. “He’s 50.”  
> “I’m not fifty,” Jack scowled.  
> “Ancient. The eldest of all of us,” Vanessa said. Her face went blank at Maria. “Hail the elder.”  
> “Hail the elder,” Maria agreed, equally devoid of emotion.  
> “I’m not fifty,” Jack snapped at them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW hi  
> this fic ain't dead yet :D Not when I've got a flight tomorrow morning and a stunning bout of **~**travel anxiety**~** <3
> 
> Anyways! References below to murder, prison, self-harm, suicide, and general DD-typical violence. Please do what you need to to take care of yourselves!

Foggy and Karen were on Father Murdock duty because Matt was busy scrambling around behind said father’s back with a load of old men at Fogwell’s, trying to set up a not-so-surprise birthday party.

Jack would have been 50 if he hadn’t gotten clocked in the head all those years back and he was taking it…well, not in any way Foggy had expected.

So far, in watching Matt and Jack interact, Foggy and Karen had decided that Matt got his pain in the ass personality entirely from his mom. She made not a single move to defend herself from this insult and so they’d taken that as confirmation.

But that was reductionist and unfair. Jack was just as much of a pain in the ass as Sister Maggie when he wanted to be, and he was specifically a pain in the ass with huge muscles and a determination to fucking suffer. Just like his goddamn son.

Matt was furious with his father. Probably because getting the man to have any positive feeling towards his birthday was teaching Matt what it felt like to deal with someone as hellbent as he was that he didn’t deserve such pomp and circumstance and, as such, any celebration that contained either of those things was a waste of time and money.

Matt called Jack a hypocrite.

He reminded Jack very clearly, with a finger stabbing him into place, that every one of Matt’s birthdays from birth to 10 years old had been nothing less than a colossal waste of time and money that they hadn’t even had, and yet Jack had refused to ever let that stop him.

Jack’s explanation for that was that obviously, Matt had deserved that effort.

And no, he would not and could not see how that related in any capacity to the issue at hand.

It was hilarious to watch Matt bang doors and bare teeth and break out cold shoulders in light of this information. It was like every one of his teenage impulses had screamed at the opportunity to be freed, however temporary or petty the issue. And so for the last week, he’d been raging around the office and Foggy’s apartment, pacing and clawing his hands, repeating the same argument at Foggy over and over, as though Foggy had forgotten just how stubborn, incorrigible, and hypocritical his would-be father-in-law was in the day between these discussions.

Jack, for his part, took all of this with a self-satisfied jaw. He showed zero sign of backing down from his stance. It was one of the few times Foggy had seen him purposefully not take Matt’s side. Normally, he was happy to let Matt do whatever he wanted, be it dangerous or stupid or annoying as fuck, and he’d bear that with the patience of a saint.

But apparently this was his own personal type of self-flagellation, and he would be damned before anyone got between it and him.

So Matt had thrown his hands up and broken down and finally, _finally_ admitted that maybe the way to end this hellish cycle was to reach out to his mother.

It was stunning, really.

Sister Maggie looked at her angry son and her undead husband and then told Matt that Jack was allowed to spend his birthday doing whatever he damn pleased. That was how birthdays worked.

Jack was triumphant.

Matt nearly cracked his teeth, he ground them so hard.

He proceeded to guilt his own mother about all the years that Jack’s birthday had taken backseat to Matt’s and all the times he’d had matches on those days, and that time that Matt had gone blind just one week out from Jack’s last one.

“He has a point, Jackie,” Sister Maggie finally said to her increasingly-miffed partner. “It _has_ been a while.”

Jack didn’t give a single flying fuck. Birthdays were birthdays. Deathdays were deathdays. What did they even matter for a guy just kind of floating around in space-time?

Matt’s devil nearly overtook him for half a second and in the space of that half-second, Foggy had felt his stomach drop.

He was used to Matt’s devil, but the flicker of strong annoyance in Jack’s eyes had been new.

Jack routinely pinned Matt to the floor of Matt’s apartment and dragged him, literally kicking and screaming, wherever he wanted him.

There wasn’t enough cover in the church to contain two devils going at it.

Sister Maggie had sensed this and put herself between her husband and son with palms outstretched to both of them.

“Settle,” she ordered. “This is a house of God.”

The effect was immediate. The blaze on both sides died back into a smolder. A bitter one, sure, but a smolder no less.

“Matty, if you want to do something for your father for his birthday, that’s your prerogative and your right. You can’t expect him to want you to or to participate if he’s not comfortable, though, do you understand?”

Yes, he understood.

“Jack,” Sister Maggie said almost tenderly. “Stop being so damn _stubborn_.”

Jack kept his arms crossed. The line of his lips said that he wanted to argue but wasn’t quite sure how to do so without invoking Sister Maggie’s wrath.

He said that he would allow for a cake. That was it. There would be no gifts or dumbass party hats and not so much as a lick of singing. None, Matthew. At all.

Matt seethed.

Jack glared.

Sister Maggie appeared to decide that this was a good compromise, well-reached. She dismissed both of them with a huff and a turn and said to let her know when there would be cake-having so that she could ask for an hour or so’s leave for the occasion.

Jack’s jaw said that he did not intend for there to be any cake after all. The concession had been a tactical tool to escape the scrutiny and ire of his beloved.

Matt’s jaw, however, was a little slimmer than Jack’s and said ‘Fuck you, old man. I got permission now.’

Which was how Foggy and Karen had ended up where they were, trying to keep Papa Murdock from contemplating filicide.

Karen, however, had just the thing for this.

She introduced Jack to the grout situation in her bathroom.

Jack stared at her for nearly thirty full seconds before asking her how long she’d lived like this. And just like that, Karen’s bathroom began the process of being cleaned and re-grouted, while she and Foggy were banished to the living room to be ‘educated and delicate.’

“We should call Frank,” Karen said like a woman on a suicide mission. “That’ll distract him.”

“Do you like this apartment?” Foggy asked her.

“Well, I’ll like it more when the bathroom looks serviceable.”

“Then we’re not inviting Frank,” Foggy said. Then paused. “But we are inviting Maria.”

 

 

Foggy called Maria and whispered to her in the corner of Karen’s bedroom that it was Jack’s birthday and he was in a shit mood about it and any moral support she had to give would be appreciated.

He failed to consider that Maria might have feelings about birthdays.

He swore his hearing was out in that ear now.

Maria came down from her shrieking to say that she’d be there asap, and she ended the call before Foggy could even get a word in edgewise.

So that was easy?

Now they just had to wait.

 

 

“JACKIE, IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY.”

Frank made one weak attempt at holding his wife back before she went tearing into the bathroom to pounce on her prey and remind him of his mortality.

“Good work, Punisher,” Foggy deadpanned. “You really put your back into it.”

Frank shrugged a shoulder.

“She wants what she wants and she gets what she wants,” he said.

“You lose your spine in Virginia or Connecticut?” Foggy asked him.

Frank pointed after Maria.

“She puts it in her bag,” he said. “I get it back when she remembers it’s there.”

This fucking guy, man.

Exhausting.

“What kind of guy hates his own birthday?” Frank asked.

Karen helpfully pointed.

Frank purposefully did not follow the finger with his face. There was the sound of unbridled enthusiasm happening that way.

“WE’RE GOING OUT,” Maria declared, reappearing in the hall with one of her arms wrapped around Jack’s neck. He appeared to humoring her by letting her pull him forward with her.

Maria froze, then spun around and shoved Jack back the way they’d come.

“I’m calling Vanessa,” she declared. She slammed the bathroom door. “Stay in there. We’re planning surprises. Ah! No buts! I don’t care. We’re going. Suck it up—what? Fine. We’ll stop by and you can change. Perfect. Thank you. Two minutes.”

She came bouncing back into the room and dug through all of Frank’s jacket pockets to find the phone she’d apparently stuffed in one of them. Then she was off again, in a toss of auburn hair, out to the balcony to wake up the nearly-nocturnal Vanessa.

Karen watched after her and then looked pointedly at Frank.

“Whipped,” she said.

He shrugged, not sorry.

 

 

“JACK, IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY, YOU ASSHOLE.”

Wade looked about ready to fall asleep standing up. Foggy kind of wanted to stick a broom handle under his head or something to prop him up.

Vanessa was in the bathroom. Maria was with her. They had Jack cornered with no hope for escape.

Really, Matt should have just asked these two to handle everything from the start.

“WE’RE GOING OUT,” Vanessa declared, bursting into the living room with Jack’s wrist in her grip. “WADE!”

Wade snapped awake in an instant. Frank and Karen scrambled away from where they had been inching in closer with the dry-erase marker from Karen’s fridge whiteboard.

“Wha’s happ’nin’?” he slurred.

“Drinks,” Vanessa told him. “Bar. Suggestions, go.”

Wade blinked a few times at her and then at her captive and fellow capturer. He shook his head a little bit.

“What’s the occasion?” he asked.

“Jack’s birthday,” Vanessa said over the guy’s attempt to downplay it. “He’s 50.”

“I’m not fifty,” Jack scowled.

“Ancient. The eldest of all of us,” Vanessa said. Her face went blank at Maria. “Hail the elder.”

“Hail the elder,” Maria agreed, equally devoid of emotion.

“I’m _not_ fifty,” Jack snapped at them.

“Jack needs to go home and change, he smells like shit. But _after_ that, we need a destination,” Vanessa carried on, ignoring him.

“Well, what’s your poison, man?” Wade asked.

Jack stared at him right in the eye.

“Lead,” he said.

The ladies shamed and blustered at him until he took it back.

“Jesus,” he told Wade instead.

The gals thought that that was a more acceptable answer.

“Jesus, I can do,” Wade said.

 

 

Vanessa and Maria, now that they had Jack in their clutches, had already apparently planned the rest of the night’s itinerary. It took them five minutes maximum. Then it took ten minutes to get back to Matt’s apartment, where the gals critiqued all of Jack’s clothes and bullied him into a un-holey shirt and a leather jacket before locking him in the bathroom again with orders to do something with his hair.

Frank noted that the man seemed overwhelmed by all these women.

“They’re his friends,” Wade said. “That’s his bad.”

His bad, indeed.

“His wife’s pretty high-strung, I think he just knows how to cut his losses,” Foggy said.

He got two stares.

“Wife?” Wade said. “As in, Red’s mom?”

Oh.

Did these folks not know?

 

 

“Wait, that nun’s Red’s _mom_?” Wade whispered into the circle that was him, Frank, Karen, and Foggy. “I thought she was like, his spiritual counselor or something.”

“No, she’s his mom,” Karen said.

Wade stared.

“She told him to pull his head out of his ass,” he said.

Frank choked.

“Not very nunly,” he noted when he got ahold of himself.

“Yeah, well, she wasn’t super nunly when she got pregnant, either,” Karen said. “She’s cool, though. She gave Matt permission to do birthday things. We just need to keep Jack distracted until all his old buddies are ready for him.”

Jack was plenty distracted. Jack was trying to get people out of his hair at the minute.

“More like, we need to move time along a little so he’s not grumpy when we head off to his party,” Foggy said.

Wade considered this long and hard, then nodded sagely.

“No problem,” he said. “Like I said, I got just the place.”

 

 

Foggy couldn’t stop snorting into his drink because Wade’s interpretation of Jesus + Drinks was a topless bar where the waiters and waitresses were dressed up in sacrilegious snatches of Catholic garb.

Vanessa and Maria were enjoying themselves immensely. They’d already made friends with a lady wearing a habit and little else. They were explaining to her that their buddy here had married a nun and had a kink.

Foggy was pretty sure that Jack was nearly ready to crawl under the table. His excuses and explanations had fallen on deaf ears.

“It’s his birthday!” Vanessa told the waitress brightly. “But he won’t introduce us to his little lovebird, so _my_ lovebird found us the next best thing.”

She beamed over her shoulder at Wade who waggled fingers back to her.

The waitress thought that was hilarious. She asked Jack what he wanted to drink, but he was too busy trying to suffocate himself to answer.

Vanessa ordered him an Old-Fashioned. When the waitress left, she manhandled him up and told him he was fucking up his chances with all these available women and Foggy took another long drink with Karen.

“At least he won’t forget it,” Karen said.

No, sir. He would not.

 

 

Jack lasted a drink.

Then he said that it was against his religion to stay any longer in that bar. And once out on the street he and the ladies set to squabbling about boundaries. Vanessa decided that, fine, okay. Maybe that was a little much, but if low-key was what Jack wanted, he should have just said so. She had a place in mind for low-key things.

 

 

 “Babe, go left. No, your other left. Perfect.”

Jack stared at Foggy with sad, sad Murdock puppy eyes. His were nearly as lethal as Matt’s.

“Is this fun?” Maria whispered into the group while Wade and Vanessa better coordinated their spray painting efforts. “I’ve never defaced property before. Is it _fun_?”

Frank drummed fingers against his chin, watching the other two and evidently thinking up some trouble. Karen would do it with him, if Maria wouldn’t. Karen was already preparing for the occasion by shaking up paint cans with a fervor that spoke of excitement.

Foggy decided that he’d leave the misdemeanors to those guys. He had a professional reputation to uphold.  

“Depends on your idea of fun, I think,” he told Maria. “It isn’t exactly my go-to.”

Although, there had been a couple moments when Foggy was a teenager that it had been very satisfying indeed.

“My brothers used to do this kind of thing,” Jack said miserably. “I can’t tell you how many times the cops would come draggin’ ‘em home to my ma.”

He was hiding behind his fingers as only a younger sibling about to get their ass beat as a casualty of a collective crime would.

“You have brothers?” Maria asked.

“Unfortunately,” Jack mumbled.

Foggy was paying close attention now. He’d never heard of these brothers. As far as he knew, Matt had only had contact with his maternal grandmother as a child and even that from a distance.

“They live around here?” Maria asked.

“God, I hope not,” Jack said, still wincing around his fingers at Vanessa and Wade as they constructed their masterpiece.

Foggy decided that this reaction might explain why Matt had shared no information on any uncles.

“You should go see them, Jack,” Maria encouraged lightly. “Maybe they’ve changed.”

Jack watched her out of the corner of his eye for several beats.

“I guess,”  he finally said. “If either of ‘em are still alive.”

Aha!

Finally! A concession towards something almost remotely pleasant.

“I’m sure they are,” Maria said. “What’re their names?”

 

 

“Change of plans, guys!” Maria called over to the other four. “We’re going huntin’!”

It was the best possible thing to say to this particular group of people, Foggy mused. Three out of four were professional hunters and Vanessa was nothing if not a gossip hound.

All of them abandoned their delinquency (and for Wade and Vanessa, their neon, dual-toned cock) to gather around and be briefed on their new mission.

Jack was very self-conscious about it.

“I, uh. I don’t give a shit about Tom,” he admitted. “But I think it’d be nice to see my, uh, oldest brother, if that’s possible.”

And why wouldn’t it be?

Jack got even more self-conscious.

“I would just like to know if he’s still living,” he said. “That’s more important right now. He’s ten years older than me. So he’d be, I guess, sixty?”

That didn’t sound so bad.

“Does he live in Hell’s Kitchen? You remember any of his addresses?” Wade asked.

Jack chewed a lip.

“Yeah,” he said. “I remember one.”

 

 

Matt’s uncle’s name was Bill.

Well, his name was William, but Jack called him ‘Billy’ and everyone else apparently called him ‘Bill.’ And Jack said the last time he’d seen him had been a couple of weeks before his death. He didn’t have a whole lot of other information on the guy besides his last residential address and he said that he didn’t expect to meet up with him that night. Just knowing he was alive would be plenty for him, for now.

Foggy looked at Karen, though, and Karen looked at Frank who looked at Maria who looked at Vanessa and Wade, and Vanessa and Wade’s face told all onlookers that they were gonna find this sonuvabitch in the next four hours, no problem.

If this was all that Jack wanted, their faces said, then this was what he’d get.

He’d unwittingly fallen into the perfect group for it and it was a lot better than drawing dicks on walls, in Foggy’s opinion.

“Alright,” he said, “I guess we ought to hit the books?”

 

 

It was kind of satisfying to know that all tracking, even vigilante and assassin tracking, started with a good ole Google search.

It was less satisfying to be presented with seven million results on Google for ‘William Murdock.’ It did not help that there had been a stupidly famous engineer named ‘William Murdoch’ in the 1800s or some shit.

“Cousin?” Wade asked Jack who gave him a dead-eyed stare for long enough that Wade cackled and went back to click-clacking away.

“Just tryin’ to give y’all some respectability,” he said.

“Yeah, well. Do the opposite of that,” Jack said.

Wade beamed at him.

“You’re funnier than your kid,” he said. “Whaddya think about wearing the horns for a night, eh? Come out with me and the Spiderkid and see what your boy gets up to at night? Could be fun. The city could have two Daredevils running wild for a minute. That’ll throw the press for a loop if nothing else.”

Jack flipped a couple of pages in the ancient phonebook in his lap.

“I’d rather not,” he said.

Wade’s smirk said that he didn’t intend to let go of the idea, but he’d let the topic drop for the time being.

 

 

It took longer than Foggy thought. One second, there was loads of frowning and clicking going on in the room, the next there was blinding light in it and people were moaning and groaning and cursing the cause of this offense.

He blinked himself back to normalcy and found Matt, of all people, standing in the doorway in a hoodie and gym shoes. His hand was on the light switch.

“Be aware that I fully recognize the irony of me saying this, but why the fuck are y’all sitting in the dark?” Matt asked.

Well, mostly because it had seemed prudent to just turn on a couple lamps to read by, but also, dude. How long had it been? How long had Matt been standing there by the door trying to figure out why the fuck no one had noticed him?

“Why’re you all at the office?” Matt asked. “I’ve been calling you, Fogs.”

Foggy wasn’t quite sure how to say ‘Sorry, I was looking for your maybe-dead uncle’ and was just coming up with something that sounded less offensive when Jack stood up and shook his head.

“They’re just humorin’ me, kiddo,” he said. “Is it party-time?”

Matt held out a hand for him. Jack took it easily.

“Why are you sad?” Matt asked. “Does it bother you that much? If it’s really that big of a deal, then we don’t have to do anything. I’m sure the guys’ll understand—”

“It ain’t that,” Jack said. “Don’t worry about it. Thanks, the rest of you. It means a lot.”

But?

They hadn’t found anything?

 

 

They went to Fogwell’s and Jack allowed himself to be swallowed up by a bunch of huge guys who Foggy had seen tease Matt as he left the gym over the years. The group had put together a real 80s-inspired birthday party. Fogwell himself had come and Foggy finally got to see the man in full.

Eventually, Foggy spotted Jack smiling at his old friends. He seemed like he was having a good time despite himself and despite the fact that every one of these old-ass gym rats seemed to have a compulsion to trap him in some manly hug or chokehold.

But still. There was something off about it. Jack hadn’t asked for a party. Or to be surrounded by his friends or anything like that.

He’d asked to find where his brother was. And Foggy couldn’t help but think that that was what he really wanted from the day.

Vanessa touched his arm and met his eyes with her own dark brown ones. She held his gaze and told him that way that she was thinking the same thing that he was.

 

 

Foggy left the Murdocks to go home and have whatever moment they were going to have with each other. Matt was a bit confused when Foggy told him to go on without him and that he’d see him later, but he accepted it.

Foggy stayed behind with his eyes set on the real man of the hour: Fogwell.

Vanessa and Maria must have seen him picking through witnesses because they sent their murderous partners off and nabbed Karen from where she was being amused by the antics of a couple of middle-aged boxers trying to impress her.

They hung back while Foggy saw his moment and went to go help Fogwell sweep confetti off his counter. The old man was huge. He was slightly terrifying in a gruff, old Hell’s Kitchener kind of way. Matt had some good stories about Fogwell. He was extremely fond of the guy who was, apparently, equally fond of him, but the face that Foggy saw didn’t seem to be one capable of feeling at all.

“Mr., uh, Fogwell?” Foggy tried. “Did you have a minute?”

Fogwell paused in his sweeping to loom menacingly at Foggy.

Or maybe that was his nice face?

“You ain’t one of mine,” Fogwell growled.

“I’m Matt’s,” Foggy said. “I’m one of—actually, I’m Matt’s partner. Boyfriend. That’s, er. That’s me, I’m surprised we haven’t met, honestly.”

Fogwell stared at him long, hard, and silent.

Foggy felt like if he looked away for so much as a second, he’d be dumped in the river with cinder blocks tied to his feet.

“Franklin,” Fogwell remembered. “Right, Matty’s young man. I remember now. He talks about you.”

Foggy did not sigh, but goddamn he wanted to.

“Right. Hopefully good?” he said.

Fogwell’s face didn’t change.

Foggy still couldn’t tell if this was his version of ‘pleasant’ or not.

“What do you need, son?” Fogwell asked.

No time for bullshit. Got it, got it.

“Mr. Murdock—I mean, Jack—was talking with me and my friends earlier and he mentioned he was interested in getting into contact with his brother, but we couldn’t seem to find him,” Foggy said. “I don’t think Matt knows this guy; he would have told me if he did. So, I was wondering if maybe you knew anything about him? It seemed a little like—”

“Jackie’s a soft soul,” Fogwell said firmly. It shut Foggy up. It was intended to and it did. Fogwell made sure that he was aware of this before continuing. “He ain’t need to see that man, Franklin. Best thing’s to keep him away. It’ll only hurt ‘em both in the end.”

Foggy was surprised—no, not surprised.

Shocked. He was shocked.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “It was the only thing he asked for—he didn’t even want—”

“A party, yeah, trust me. We all know,” Fogwell said. “Boy’s one of mine. And we ain’t just a bunch of lugs smashing heads, kid. It don’t look like much, I know, but this shithole and all the shitheads in it are a family. We look out for each other. Jackie came into my fold when he was yay big.” He held his hand at his shoulder. “Been trying to get that kid to let us give him a damn cake since he got here. I’m surprised he let us have one for ‘im now, although I guess a l’il perspective’ll do that to ya.”

Foggy didn’t really know what to say.

“I don’t understand,” he reiterated.

Fogwell sighed and set the dustpan he was collecting confetti in on the counter.

“Bill, right?” he said.

“That’s right.”

Fogwell shook his head sadly.

“Man’s in prison, son,” he said. “Went in for killin’ his wife and step-daughter.”

Holy. _Shit_.

“Are you—are you sure?”

Fogwell’s pitying face was marginally softer than his normal one.

“I’m sure,” he said. “Jack used to go visit him once a week, as long as he could. He was askin’ now probably ‘cause he ain’t know if the man died. I don’t think he has. Word would’ve got around if he did. Bill Murdock was a good guy back in the day, Franklin. No one thought he had it in him to do what he did. But that’s the thing about the Murdocks, you ain’t never know when one of them’s gonna snap.”

Jesus.

No wonder Jack hadn’t expected to see his brother that night. He just didn’t have it in him to say it aloud.

“Bill never hurt Jack, did he?” Foggy asked.

Fogwell lifted one of his gray eyebrows.

“Hurt Jackie? No, no. That wasn’t Bill. Bill _raised_ Jackie. That was the thing. Bill was the one who brought him to me to begin with. This was only a couple months before he, well. Anyways. Jack’s always thought that he was responsible in some way for what happened. Thought maybe he was puttin’ stress on Bill or something. He was seventeen when it all happened, and of course, he was tryin’ to leave home and whatnot and Bill was worried about him goin’ out on his own.”

Fogwell sighed.

“Jack’s always thought that that had something to do with the guy snappin’,” he said. “Couldn’t talk ‘im out of it. Even Bill couldn’t talk ‘im out of it. It just hurt ‘em both, I know. ‘Cause Bill never argued with the cops. He says ‘I killed my wife and my baby girl,’ that’s what he said, right to a judge. When they asked him why, he says ‘your honor, I ain’t got no explanation for you and no explanation for myself.’ And just like that, they gave ‘im 50 years with the possibility of parole. 25 for each life he took.”

Foggy squeezed his eyes closed hard and when he reopened them, Fogwell was leaning against the counter.

“I’m telling you, son. Let ‘em be,” he said.

“I don’t think that’s my decision to make,” Foggy said sadly.

The old man watched him out of the corner of his eye and then nodded.

 

 

The gals were sobered by the news when everyone regrouped by the fence on the side of the gym.

“Shit, man, that’s heavy,” Vanessa said.

“Pretty standard for Hell’s Kitchen,” Foggy sighed. “But I don’t know what to do.”

He looked past his hair and found a load of eyebrows of various curvatures facing him.

“What?” he asked.

The eyebrows did not cease to be weird.

“Dude,” Vanessa said, “Me and Maria here are willingly attached to two assassins. Your own boyfriend is one shade shy of that. Come on, man. Perspective.”

Foggy felt his face twist up in a wince.

She was kinda right.

Really right.

 _Super_ right.

Wade had stated on multiple occasions that he’d just _wished_ that he’d gotten back to Canada in time to murder his own father before the guy’s cardiac arrest. Frank had nigh-senselessly set out to kill anyone and everyone who’d so much as spoken the names of his wife and kids.

Those two were exchanging looks that were very clearly trying to work out what the right face to make here was.

“Matt doesn’t know this,” Foggy said. “I don’t want to be the one who—”

“I’ll do it?” Frank offered. “Won’t make much difference, honestly. We already got piles of kindling put aside for each other.”

…not helpful, Francis.

“It’s not that big of a deal, Nelson,” Wade said diplomatically. “Sure, old man Fogwell says whatever, but it ain’t his family, is it? Let Johnnie-boy make his decision. It’s his brother. And if he wants to see the guy, man, who’s right is it to stop ‘em?”

…also not helping, Wade Winston.

“Here, why don’t we do this?” Maria said. “We’ll just find out if this guy’s still kickin’ around in the prison system and if he is, we’ll tell Jack. We don’t have to tell Matt. You don’t even have to be involved, Foggy. We’ll figure it out, me and Vanessa, and then it’ll be between the three of us.”

Foggy got the feeling that even if he said ‘no,’ these guys were gonna do it anyways.

The wide grins he got upon voicing that statement confirmed it.

He sighed.

 

 

Bill Murdock was at Rikers, which was easy enough.

Frank found his name listed among some paperwork he absolutely had no right to be accessing. Maria passed the information on to Jack through text.

 

 

“Dad never told me about any of his family,” Matt told Foggy in the office the next day.

“No?” Foggy asked, aware that Karen had an ear trained on them. “Why not?”

Matt sighed.

“Said that he didn’t want me to grow up thinkin’ that our family was hopeless. You know he’s the youngest of five kids, Fogs? Five. Count ‘em.”

Dude.

“Right?”

That was a lot.

“Yeah,” Matt said. “Sister Maggie’s the second oldest of four. _Four_. I went to ask her about Dad this morning and she told me her favorite sister committed suicide. Like. Foggy.” Matt’s hands were shaking. He put the folders he’d been picking through back down onto the desk.

Foggy reached out to hold his arm.

“Matt, I’m sure she—”

“ _I_ tried to kill myself at St. Agnes,” Matt blurted out.

Foggy felt his gut turn to ice.

“Matt?” he said.

“I—when I was fifteen,” Matt said. “She found me. _She_ found me. Can you—she found her sister, too. I can’t even _imagine_ what that must have been like. Can you--? I just—I feel—I don’t—"

There were reasons that Sister Maggie and Jack had come together, then. There were reasons that they’d isolated their son.

Christ.

“Matty, come here,” Foggy said, holding out his arms. Matt didn’t come to them. Foggy went to him instead and wrapped a hand around the base of his neck to pull him in closer. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I didn’t—I don’t—I don’t even know what to say to them,” Matt murmured into Foggy’s neck. Foggy felt Karen’s heat come in close to them. Her slim fingers touched his arm in comfort and support.

“Be honest,” Karen said softly. “Say you understand now.”

Foggy closed his eyes tight and pressed the side of his head against Matt’s.

She was right. He just had to be honest.

 

 

Jack seemed pained when Foggy saw him next. Matt kept nudging at him as though he could sense the lines around Jack’s eyes.

“I’m okay,” Jack said every time.

Matt didn’t believe him.

Jack had scheduled a visit with his brother. He was anxious. Matt said that he hadn’t been sleeping. He was awake when Matt came in from the streets and he stayed up to clean all Matt’s wounds thoroughly before seeing him off to bed.

Matt was going with him to meet his uncle.

Foggy thought that Matt actually wanted to go with in order to shove himself between the two of them should any difficult conversations arise. Matt didn’t seem entirely interested in the idea of having an uncle himself, although he told Foggy that he had asked Jack more about the guy to know what he was getting into.

Jack said that he didn’t know what Bill was like anymore. It had been a long time. He only knew the person that Bill had been towards him. And Bill had always been a certain type of person towards him.

Jack never called his brother two-faced, but there was a lingering feeling there that he felt like he was working with two separate people in his older brother.

Foggy wondered if he’d accepted Daredevil so easily because he’d already had experience navigating his family and their devils.

Matt thought so.

Matt was drowning in guilt over it.

He asked Foggy if he thought that he should stop being Daredevil. If he wasn’t following his uncle’s footsteps. If he wouldn’t eventually kill two innocent people in a rage that he couldn’t control.

Foggy didn’t know how to answer him.

Violence and poverty run in families.

 

 

Foggy didn’t go with the two Murdocks to meet their third, but he was there in the aftermath. Sort of.

Jack didn’t come home with Matt.

“He went to go talk to Sister Maggie,” Matt told Foggy.

“Is he okay?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Christ.”

Matty fidgeted, rubbing his fingers together as he did. He caught himself doing it and forced himself to stop, but really just transferred the motion to the loop on his cane.

“He was really nice?” he finally said. “My uncle, I mean. Like? He cried a lot. He sounds like Dad, but older and a little deeper. It’s the same accent. The, uh, the guards let them hug because of the circumstances.”

That must have been hard.

“It’s weird,” Matt said.

“I’ll bet,” Foggy told him.

“He talks to my dad weird. He kept saying sorry,” Matt said. “He kept saying that it was all his fault. And Dad kept saying it wasn’t, but I don’t think they believed each other.”

That sounded pretty spot on for Murdock communication skills.

“Did he talk to you at all?” Foggy asked.

Matt scrubbed at his jaw.

“He’d met me already,” he said after a while of thinking. “I guess he met me when I was little. I don’t remember it, though. He held my face and like—” Matt pressed his hands on each side of his cheeks, “—shook it. Kept talking about how big I was and how dark my hair got and how I look like Dad. His hands are _huge_ , Fogs. Like, I think he’s bigger than Dad. Or maybe just wider? I don’t know.”

That was hard to imagine. Jack was already a big dude. Foggy realized Matt had gone quiet again.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I think? I’m a shrimp? In this family?” Matt said, devastated.

 

 

Karen rolled in laughter when Foggy presented her with Matt’s revelation. Matt was displeased with her.

“I’m having a crisis, Karen,” he snapped.

Karen was not sympathetic.

Matt huffed and puffed at her furiously.

“Just you wait,” he said. “I’m gonna get me two more inches somehow, and when I do, it’s all over for you, Page.”

“Don’t worry, babycakes, I got some heels you can borrow,” Karen cooed at him once she’d gotten ahold of herself.

Matt threw paperwork at her and set her off all over again.

 

 

Matt appealed to Sister Maggie. She took one look at him and just said, “Sorry, kiddo,” and it was the final nail in the coffin for him.

Jack, who seemed to have come out on the other side of things okay after a day or so to process, hugged Matt close when he got home. He promised him that he was very cute.

“I want to be _tall_ not cute,” Matt snapped at him. “Everyone else is tall, yes?”

Jack pet his hair tenderly.

“You’re plenty tall,” he said.

Matt patted at his face.

“You’re lying,” he said. “I want to be tall.”

“You’re perfect as you are, honey.”

“How tall was your dad?”

“You’re _perfect_ , Matty.”

Matt was horrified. He turned to Foggy on the verge of tears.

“I am a _shrimp_ ,” he whimpered.

 

 

Matt’s grandpa, on the rare occasion that he was standing, was around 6’ 3”, Jack admitted. He himself was about 6’1”. Both of his brothers were taller than that, and his sisters, he thought he remembered being around 5’10.

Matt sought out more information and came back from Sister Maggie with the same information that Jack bestowed upon Foggy and Karen in his absence.

No one in Sister Maggie’s family was taller than 5’8”.

“WHY,” Matt said, shaking Jack by the shirt upon arrival home from his mission.

“Let go,” Jack said, inhumanly patient once again. “I told you, you’re fine. You’re lucky that your mama’s genes went mostly to your head. Let go.”

Matt dropped down and sprawled himself out all over the couch next to Jack to show the world through his body the level of trauma he was experiencing. Jack ruined the effect by petting at his hair.

“At least you’re not so ginger anymore,” he said.

Matt made a sound of disgust and batted away his hand.

“Half as many freckles,” Jack teased.

“That’s your fault, too, why do you hate me?” Matt moaned.

“I don’t hate you.”

“You _obviously_ do. I want. To be. Tall.”

“Matt, this affects you in no way. You’re average height. A perfectly normal—”

“I’m not _average_ , Dad. I’ve never been average. Or normal. Fuck normal.”

Jack gave up at that point, which was fair. Even Foggy could see that this conversation was going nowhere anytime soon.

“I did want to say thanks,” Jack told Foggy and Karen over Matt’s pouting. “It was really good to see Bill again. He hasn’t changed much. It,” he creaked and swallowed and the gesture made Foggy’s throat hurt a little bit.

“It means a lot,” Jack finished.

“Anytime,” Karen said a bit watery, herself.

“For real, anytime,” Foggy said.

“Next time, just ask,” Matt’s muffled voice growled from the couch cushion. Jack laughed and ruffled his hair.

 

 


End file.
